There are things that Carter Page doesn’t want to talk about.
The former Merrill Lynch banker, who was relatively unknown in politics before he was touted as being a foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign, has steadfastly declined to comment on how he got involved in the Republican campaign. He told ABC News on Thursday that he would not disclose the name of the person who recruited him into the campaign because it would fuel conspiracy theories and have their “lives disrupted”.
Huh. Switching to top-level code, would it be Effersonjay Eauregardbay Essionssay the uckingfay Irdthay? I ask because it seems like that’s who met the Russians along with Page in Cleveland. And it was Sess … Essionssay, who led the Trump policy team that contained Page. And it kind of seems to be common knowledge.
Jeff Sessions sent Carter Page to assist Trump with Russia alignment–senators need to dig into the backstory.
But the bigger problem for Page, and all his friends, isn’t so much what he won’t say, but how what he does say keeps changing.
Page has conducted interview after interview in an attempt to downplay his interactions with the Russian government and business communities. But Page, who dodges his interviewers’ questions with a slight smile, repeatedly bumbles through his recountings of which Russians he met with and what they discussed. The conversations tend to open new lines of inquiry rather than close them.
Mostly what Carter Page has displayed in interview after interview is that he’s completely unhinged. He’s convinced the FBI isn’t just listening in on him, but blocking his communications:
Page told TPM on Thursday that he was “jammed” and unable to conduct a phone interview, but that the FBI was “unjustified” in monitoring his communications.
“It shows how low the Clinton/Obama regime went to destroy our democracy and suppress dissidents who did not fully support their failed foreign policy,” he said in an emailed statement.
Yes, because right now Hillary Clinton is directing the FBI to jam Carter Page’s cell phone.
People who used to work with Page at Merrill Lynch also have fond memories of his time with the firm:
Ian Bremmer, the influential president of the Eurasia Group, on Thursday used Twitter to call Page the “most wackadoodle” alumni of the firm in history.
But no matter how hard the Trump regime works to hold Page at a distance now, the paranoid wackadoodle was a hand-selected part of his foreign policy team. Why? Because of his Russian expertise.
In what he said was his capacity as a private citizen, Page gave a commencement address in July 2016 at Moscow’s New Economic School that slammed the United States’ “hypocritical” policy toward Russia and called for the U.S. to lift the sanctions put in place after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. …
Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States who’s had a run-in with many a Trump campaign staffer, also had an encounter with Page. …
And then there are those claims that Page promised to convince Trump to drop sanctions against Russia in exchange for a few million dollars worth of stock in the Russian state owned oil and gas company—a claim that included a prediction about an upcoming sale of part of that company that just happened to nail every detail.
Page now says he can’t be sure that he didn’t talked about sanctions, and that we’ll just have to see what the FISA warrant reveals. Here’s a clue: Whatever was convincing enough to wrangle a FISA warrant three times, is not going to be good for Carter Page.
