Update: for more news concerning possible quid pro quo deals between the Trump campaign and Russia, also see Campaign advisor changes story and now contradicts Trump, says Donald ordered Ukraine change at RNC.
Yesterday came news of another 180 degree reversal from a Trump campaign surrogate.
As revealed by USA Today, Carter Page met the Russian ambassador last summer ; Page had previously denied, to NPR’s Judy Woodruff, having met Russian government officials while with the Trump campaign, and his story reversal may be an even bigger deal than that of Jeff Sessions, because of the oil.
Russian oil to be exact. Back to that in a moment.
Even as news broke yesterday of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ admission that he met twice with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the 2016 election, out came the USA Today story. Then Carter Page confirmed to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that he had indeed met the Russian ambassador last Summer in Cleveland. Joining Page at the meeting was Trump campaign adviser J.D. Gordon
Cleveland, you say ? Oh, how interesting — because it’s just been revealed by the Wall Street Journal that Jeff Sessions also met ambassador Kislyak in Cleveland last Summer. Sessions claims he did so serving in his capacity as U.S. Senator but used his own political funds to travel to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and even made a pro-Trump speech there.
J.D. Gordon’s easy to peg — a retired Navy man and former Pentagon spokesperson with rightwing think tank ties. A budding pundit.
Page is more complex. Tapped as one of Donald Trump’s original foreign policy advisory team, Carter Page is an energy industry consultant who has worked in that capacity in Russia. In 2008 he formed a NYC-based energy investment and consulting firm together with a former executive from Russia’s huge Gazprom natural gas company, in which Page has an ownership stake (as he told CNN in August 2016.) He also has close ties to the Russian oil company Rosneft.
Page, who seems to have been very much in favor within the Kremlin, has been characterized by a U.S. government official as “a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did” and as of last year was “frequently quoted on Russian television, which hails him as a “famous American economist” “.
Now, back in September, Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff (formerly with Newsweek) reported that,
“U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft.”
That “three day trip” was in early July 2016. Two weeks later, Page — along with Jeff Sessions and Trump advisor J.D. Gordon — met Russian ambassador Kislyak at a Heritage Foundation event held near the Republican National Convention. Kislyak was one of a reported 50 ambassadors from different nations at the event, many of whom met with sessions. Sessions reportedly met Kislyak individually.
Rosneft, the huge Russian oil company, seems to be a major fan of Carter Page. Last Fall, a Rosneft spokesman told Politico reporter Julia Ioffe that Page is “an extremely well-informed, authoritative expert on Russia” and that “People really respect him in this industry. He’s a very serious guy, and he has a good reputation.”
First, as Ioffe observes, Page doesn’t seem to have learned to speak the Russian language despite having lived three years in Russia. And the Rosneft praise for him is notable in context of Ioffe’s other Russian energy industry sources who had known or worked with Page in a professional capacity and seemed to consider him marginally competent at best and hardly a leading figure in the energy industry.
Now, to the Steele dossier. As Business Insider summed it up,
A dossier with unverified claims about President Donald Trump's ties to Russia contained allegations that Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia's state oil company, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia.
The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow
In early December 2016, Russia’s Rosneft sold a 19.5 percent stake in the company to foreign buyers, officially a “50/50 joint venture between Qatar and the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore”. But a Reuters investigation showed that “the ownership structure of the stake ultimately includes a Cayman Islands company whose beneficial owners cannot be traced” (emphasis mine).
So, Russia had just sold off a big chunk of its oil company “crown jewel” to mystery buyers.
As it happens former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page was back in Moscow on December 8th, just one day after the Rosneft 19.5% selloff deal was first reported. Russian media outlets covered Page’s meeting with top Rosneft officials on December 12th, 2016 and quoted him as stating,
"I had the opportunity to meet with some of the top managers of the company Rosneft”
Carter Page told Russian media that he had not met with Rosneft head Igor Sechin but emphasized that such a meeting “would have been a great honor”.
It was curious. Why the meeting with Rosneft executives during that time window ? A bit later in December, future Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would discuss U.S. sanctions against Russia with Russian ambassador Kislyak.
Then, in early February 2017, the new Trump Administration partially lifted U.S. sanctions against Russia — the very sanctions that Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn denied having discussed in his talk with Russian ambassador Kislyak, the public revelation of which ultimately forced Flynn’s resignation from the Trump administration.
Was the Steele Dossier allegation true ? We don’t know, but we do know that at least one other Trump administration official, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, has rather open ties to Rosneft’s Igor Sechin and Vladimir Putin himself.
In 2011 Tillerson, working as ExxonMobil CEO, negotiated a Rosneft/ExxonMobil “strategic partnership”. In 2013 Vladimir Putin honored Tillerson with Russia’s “Order of Friendship” award.
In 2014, shortly after the United States had placed sanctions on Rosneft head Igor Sechin, Rex Tillerson traveled to Moscow where he joined Sechin in addressing the World Petroleum Conference.
In short, it’s a guy like Tillerson who would have the connections, the gravitas, and the acumen to broker something like the rumored “Russian oil for lifting sanctions” deal, and he’d certainly have the diplomatic savvy to keep his name out of it by using a comparative nonentity such as Carter Page, as a go-between.
That’s speculative, granted. But we do know that Carter Page appears to be a man out of his depth and increasingly rattled, as evidenced by his reversal on meeting Kislyak and also perhaps by his bizarre post-election letter to the Department of Justice — which accused the Clinton campaign of “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses” and charged that,
“the actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in U.S. history since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was similarly targeted for his anti-war views in the 1960’s.”
Now, with Page’s 180 degree reversal, his admission to Chris Hayes that he did in fact meet with the Russian ambassador last Summer, we have no less than three current and former Trump administration members and campaign operative who seem to have lied about, or suffered astonishing memory lapses about, meeting Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
So, why all the apparent lying ?
And that’s not the end of it. Last night, a CNN story highlighted yet more Trump administration members and campaign operatives who last year met Kislyak (a meeting originally reported by Evan Osnos, David Remnick and Joshua Yaffa writing for the New Yorker). One was the notoriously Islamaphobic Walid Phares. The other was Donald Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner — a man who by most accounts has Trump’s deep trust as an inner-circle ally and confident.
What was so important, last December 2016, for Sergey Kislyak to make the trip from Washington D.C. to Trump Tower in New York City, where the Russian Ambassador met with Michael Flynn, soon to become (briefly) Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, and with one of Trump’s most trusted (and discrete) allies, Jared Kushner ?
What possible intersection of Russian national interest and Trump interest could have prompted such a journey and a meeting ?
And how many other Trump administration officials and campaign members might have met the Russian ambassador ? We’re up to six confirmed.
Why ?
Just asking.