'Carter Page is a very unlikely GOP hero'
NATASHA BERTRAND
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
... If the fluidity of Page’s recollections .. isn’t enough to make Republicans think twice about hanging their hat on his innocence, his run-in with two Russian spies three years before he joined the campaign should. According to the Justice Department, Page met with, emailed with, and “provided documents to” one of the spies, Victor Podobnyy, who was posing as a diplomat in New York City while acting as an agent of Russia’s foreign-intelligence agency, known as the SVR. Page gave Podobnyy information “about the energy business” from January to June of 2013, according to the DOJ’s criminal complaint, and Podobnyy appeared to acknowledge in intercepted conversations that he was using Page as a “useful idiot” for intelligence-gathering purposes. Page evidently wasn’t the wiser: In August 2013, he wrote a letter to a book editor claiming that he had been serving as “an informal adviser to the staff of the Kremlin” on “energy issues.
Page told the FBI he didn’t know the Russians were spies. But the bureau was evidently not convinced—while descriptions of Page’s interactions with the spies remain redacted, the fisa application did discuss the efforts by Podobnyy and two other Russian intelligence operatives to recruit “New York City residents” as assets in 2013, when Page was first interviewed by FBI counterintelligence agents” ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/carter-page-is-a-very-unlikely-gop-hero/570655/
= new reply since forum marked as read
