Carter Page
Carter William Page is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.
Page was a focus of multiple government investigations examining the 2016 Russian election interference and possible links to the Trump campaign. The FBI obtained four FISA warrants to surveil Page beginning in October 2016; in 2019, the Justice Department determined the final two warrants were invalid. In April 2019, the Mueller report concluded that the investigation "did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government" in its interference efforts.
DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz identified 17 significant errors and omissions in the FISA applications in December 2019. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found in August 2020 that despite FISA problems, Page's "previous ties to Russian intelligence officers, coupled with his Russian travel, justified the FBI's initial concerns." Special Counsel John Durham prosecuted FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty in August 2020 to altering a CIA email used in the warrant process. Durham's May 2023 report concluded that the FBI "did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations" in the Steele dossier used to support the warrants, characterizing the Page surveillance as a "dry hole."
Page was never charged with any crime. He has filed four lawsuits related to the investigations; all were dismissed by courts.
Life and career
Carter Page was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 3, 1971, the son of Allan Robert Page and Rachel Page. His father was from Galway, New York, and his mother was from Minneapolis. His father was a manager and executive with the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company.Education and military service
Page was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated from Poughkeepsie's Our Lady of Lourdes High School in 1989. Page graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the United States Naval Academy in 1993; he graduated with distinction and was chosen for the Navy's Trident Scholar program, which gives selected officers the opportunity for independent academic research and study. During his senior year at the Naval Academy, he worked in the office of U.S. Representative Les Aspin as a researcher for the House Armed Services Committee. He served in the U.S. Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission, and attained the rank of lieutenant. In 1994, he completed an MA degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown University. After leaving active duty in 1998, Page was a member of the Navy's inactive reserve until 2004.Further education and business
After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2001 he received an MBA degree from New York University. In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm's London office, was a vice president in the company's Moscow office, and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch's energy and power department in New York. Page has stated that he worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading Russian energy companies. According to business people interviewed by Politico in 2016, Page's work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers.After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy Capital, with partner James Richard and a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko. The fund operates out of a Manhattan co-working space shared with a booking agency for wedding bands, and as of late 2017, Page was the firm's sole employee. Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project. The building which contains Page's working space is connected to Trump Tower by an atrium, a fact Page referenced when describing his work for the 2016 Trump campaign in a 2017 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Page received a PhD degree from SOAS, University of London in 2012, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner. His doctoral dissertation on the transition of Asian countries from communism to capitalism was rejected twice before ultimately being accepted by new examiners. One of his original examiners later said Page "knew next to nothing" about the subject matter and was unfamiliar with "basic concepts" such as Marxism and state capitalism. He sought unsuccessfully to publish his dissertation as a book; a reviewer described it as "very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument." Page blamed the rejection on anti-Russian and anti-American bias. He later ran an international affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University. In more recent years, he has written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University. In 2022, he earned an LLM from Fordham University School of Law.
Foreign policy and ties to Russia
In 1998, Page joined the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm, but left three months later. In 2017, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer recalled on his Twitter feed that Page's strong pro-Russian stance was "not a good fit" for the firm and that Page was its "most wackadoodle" alumnus. Stephen Sestanovich later described Page's foreign-policy views as having "an edgy Putinist resentment" and a sympathy to Russian leader Vladimir Putin's criticisms of the United States. Over time, Page became increasingly critical of United States foreign policy toward Russia, and more supportive of Putin, with a United States official describing Page as "a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did". Page is frequently quoted by Russian state television, where he is presented as a "famous American economist".In August 2013, Page wrote, "Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda." Page described his role differently in 2018: "I sat in on some meetings, but to call me an advisor is way over the top."
Also in 2013, Evgeny Buryakov and two other Russians attempted to recruit Page as an intelligence source, and one of them, Victor Podobnyy, described Page as enthusiastic about business opportunities in Russia but an "idiot". "I also promised him a lot," Podobnyy reported to a fellow Russian intelligence officer at the time, according to an FBI transcript of their conversation, which was covertly recorded. "How else to work with foreigners?" Podobnyy added.
Page was the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in 2014, at least two years earlier than was indicated in the stories concerning his role in the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. 2017 news accounts about the warrant indicated it was granted because of Page's ties to Buryakov, Podobnyy, and the third Russian who attempted to recruit him, Igor Sporyshev.
Trump 2016 presidential campaign
Trump announced Page as a foreign policy adviser in his campaign on March 21, 2016. On September 23, 2016, Yahoo News reported U.S. intelligence officials investigated alleged contacts between Page and Russian officials subject to U.S. sanctions, including Igor Sechin, the president of state-run Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft. Page promptly left the Trump campaign. Upon his departure, Trump campaign communications director Jason Miller said of Page, "He’s never been a part of our campaign. Period." Another campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, stated, "we are not aware of any of his activities, past or present."Shortly after Page left the Trump campaign, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained another warrant from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 to surveil Page's communications and read his saved emails. To issue the warrant, a federal judge concluded there was probable cause to believe that Page was a foreign agent knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence for the Russian government. The initial 90-day warrant was subsequently renewed three times. The New York Times reported on May 18, 2018, that the surveillance warrant expired around October 2017. The FBI did not use a so-called "filter team" to prevent irrelevant information from being seen by investigators, and it was later determined that use of such a team is not required.
In January 2017, Page's name appeared repeatedly in the Steele dossier containing allegations of close interactions between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. By the end of January 2017, Page was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Page was not accused of any wrongdoing.
The Trump Administration attempted to distance itself from Page, saying that he had never met Trump or advised him about anything, but a December 2016 Page press conference in Russia contradicts the claim that Page and Trump never met. Page responded to a question about his contact with Trump saying, "I've certainly been in a number of meetings with him and I've learned a tremendous amount from him." The Mueller Report found that Page produced work for the campaign, traveled with Trump to a campaign speech and "Chief policy adviser Sam Clovis expressed appreciation for Page's work and praised his work to other Campaign officials".
In October 2017, Page said he would not cooperate with requests to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee and would assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He said this was because they were requesting documents dating back to 2010, and he did not want to be caught in a "perjury trap". He expressed the wish to testify before the committee in an open setting.
On July 21, 2018, the Justice Department released a heavily redacted version of the October 2016 FISA warrant application for Page, which expressed in part the FBI's belief that Page "has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government", as well as that Page had been the subject of targeted recruitment by Russian intelligence agencies. The application also said that Page and a Russian intelligence operative had met in secret to discuss compromising material the Russian government held against "Candidate #2" and the possibility of the Russians giving it to the Trump campaign. Former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova, who was under consideration to join Trump's legal team in 2018, argued before and after release of the Mueller Report that the FISA warrants to surveil Page were obtained illegally. Other observers opposed diGenova's view, pointing out that the warrants were approved by four different judges, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents.
The FBI applications to the FISA court to wiretap Page were partly founded on the Steele dossier, and the dossier "played a central and essential role" in the FBI applications to the FISA court to wiretap Page.
In 2019 the Justice Department determined the last two of four FISA warrants to surveil Page were invalid.