There’s a figure who is essential to understanding how Russiagate happened. His name was mentioned in news accounts many times early on in this story, but he has since receded into obscurity. He was characterized as key to the original accusations that Trump colluded with Moscow. The man was later accused of being a Russian agent of influence, even though as a matter of public record, he was only a couple years earlier an FBI informant in a major espionage case that led to the break-up of a Russian intelligence operation, and his role in that — and what it implies about Carter Page’s subsequent actions — continues to be overlooked.
This is the untold story of a New York energy trader, and once frequent flyer to Russia who popped up suddenly in Donald Trump’s inner circle last summer, before almost as quickly being the only American in Russiagate we know who actually was targeted for electronic surveillance after issuance of a FISA warrant. His name is Carter Page.
Background:
In 2014, the FBI quietly infiltrated and just as quietly arrested a ring of Russian SVR intelligence service operatives working under diplomatic UN cover in New York. They were quietly expelled, but a Non-Official Cover (NOC) agent was tried early the next year for among other things, seeking information about U.S. economic sanctions against Russian banks.
Key to the FBI’s investigation in 2013, an obscure energy trader named Carter Page was turned as a cooperating FBI witness, and during the 2015 trial, he testified as “Male-1” against the SVR agents who had attempted to recruit him. http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/15/politics/russia-spy-recruitment-tactics-fbi-carter-page/index.html
Carter Page is also at the core of the Christopher Steele “Pee Pee” Dossier, which set off the “Russiagate” scandal when it first emerged publicly in mid-2016. Page was the target of electronic and human surveillance when he traveled to Moscow in 2015 and 2016 — it’s significant that Page is the only figure for whom the Obama DOJ actually obtained a FISA warrant — and it appears in the summer of 2016 he was still acting as an FBI informant as he allegedly implicated others in the Trump campaign in Russiagate. A few months ago, it was confirmed that a FISA warrant had been obtained to monitor Page in his travels to Russia: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/carter-page-fisa-russia-trump-237137
Page has often boasted about his contacts in Russia and the region, based in part on his work there as an investment banker on energy issues for several years in the 2000s. Since last fall, the FBI is believed to have been investigating whether Page engaged in some kind of private communications with Russian officials as part of its broader probe into the election meddling. Last August, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid singled out Page and his visit to Moscow, without naming him, in asking Comey to have the FBI investigate Trump associates for possible ties to Russia’s election interference.
Page, who founded the New York-based investment firm Global Energy Capital, has said he hasn’t had any inappropriate contacts with Russian officials, either as a representative of the Trump campaign or as a private individual and energy consultant, and that he welcomes the investigations because they will clear his name of unfair . . .
Thus was an FBI informant against Russian intelligence ring in Manhattan turned into the central figure in a partisan domestic effort to entrap Trump campaign figures in an elaborate domestic political circus stemming from alleged Russian interference in the election.
The Short and the Long on Carter Page
The short and the long of the story is that since 2013 the FBI had been engaged in Counter-Intelligence operations using several confidential sources, including Carter Page, and the continued smokescreen about him was justified at the time on the usual grounds of not compromising intelligence assets and methods. Page’s role, while undoubtedly known to Russian intel since the arrests of their agents in 2014, and never very well protected in court records and DOJ statements, still remains obscured by the major media. That much of the surveillance gathered against Trump associates was obtained by pretext and was politically motivated also likely factored into the peculiar way in which this matter has unfolded.
Is Carter Page an FBI informant who wormed into Trump’s campaign?
The strongest and the weakest part of the public case that Russia tried to influence the 2016 elections involves one man, Carter Page, during part of 2016 a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign.
Page has been portrayed in a number of media accounts as a dupe of Russian intelligence. He’s actually a 45 year old New York energy market analyst and investment banker who helped the FBI prosecute a Non-Official Cover Russian intelligence officer and a group of SVR agents in 2014.
As far as the cat can be walked back, the beginnings of “Russiagate” may have been FBI surveillance of Carter Page during a 2013 meeting with Victor Podobnyy, a Russian “Junior Attache” to the UN in NY. U.S. intelligence had Podobnyy under human and electronic surveillance as a suspected Russian SVR intelligence operative, and the FBI had recorded a conversation in March of between Podoobnyy and a second Russian agent discussing his attempt to recruit Page as an asset.
According to court documents, in January 2013, Carter Page first met Podobnyy at an international energy conference in NY, and later that year Page provided information about the U.S. energy industry to Podobbny. But, this is where it only starts to get really interesting.
In a letter published by CNN, Page informed a US Senate committee that shortly after he met with Podobnny in 2013 he was interviewed by federal agents in June, 2013 and that he became a cooperating witness in the federal investigation and resulting 2015 prosecution.
Indeed, a court document in the 2015 trial of an SVR officer confirms that Page was indeed interviewed by two FBI Agents about dealings with Podobnyy. Carter Page is referred to in the Affidavit as Male-1: [See FBI Affidavit for the Prosecution, http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/2015_0126_spyring2.pdf.%5D ]
34. On or about June 13, 2013, [FBI] Agent-2 and I interviewed
Male-1. Male-1 stated that he first met VICTOR PODOBNYY, the
defendant, in January 2013 at an energy symposium in New York City.
During this initial meeting, PODOBNYY gave Male-1 PODOBNYY’s
business card and two email addresses. Over the following months,
Male-1 and PODOBNYY exchanged emails about the energy business and
met in person on occasion, with Male-1 providing PODOBNYY with
Male-l’s outlook on the current and future of the energy industry.
Male-1 also provided documents to PODOBNYY about the energy business.
Having cooperated with the FBI in a counter-intelligence operation and later as a witness in the 2015 trial of a Russian intelligence officer, it seems implausible that Page could have been a willing secret agent of the Russians at any point thereafter. More likely, he was playing out a role assigned to him, perhaps under duress, by the FBI. Page was apparently sufficiently trusted by the FBI that he was allowed to travel to Russia several times before and after the Bureau busted the Podobnny cell in September 2014.
It should be pointed out that Page was never charged as an accomplice.
In fact, Page appears to have insinuated himself into the Trump campaign suddenly in early 2016 when it was short-handed without persons with direct foreign experience. He seemingly emerged out of nowhere. A biography in Newsweek portrayed him as something of a mystery whose role in the campaign is unclear, as is how he managed to gain nearly instant access as a junior foreign policy advisor to Trump: http://www.newsweek.com/carter-page-fbi-surveillance-us-presidential-election-russia-donald-trump-58
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Reporters who went foraging for information on him during the race for the White House found little. Within Trump’s team, no one seemed to know who hired him, or what he did for the campaign. Among U.S. businessmen who had worked in Russia, and the Russians they had worked with, few knew Page’s name. In a scathing Politico article about Page, an unnamed Western investor in Russian energy told the author: “I can poll any number of people involved in energy in Russia about Carter Page and they’ll say, `Carter who? You mean Jimmy Carter?'”
What’s notable here that seems to have evaded previous notice at Politico, The Washington Post, CNN and the rest is that instead of being a Russian agent of influence, Page at the time he spang briefly into a prominent role within the Trump campaign in early 2016, was already an FBI informant, something the Russians would obviously know. This becomes even more crucial later that summer after Page returned from a business trip to Moscow when he was repeatedly named in the James Steele “dirty dossier” as a close confident of Russian energy officials and bankers. Page actually appears to have all the hallmarks of an FBI informant, or an agent provocateur, who was planted into the Trump campaign as part of an intelligence operation. Only, it seems apparent, the intelligence service he was actually serving was American rather than Russian.
That is significant for another very important reason – according to the Washington Post, the FBI obtained a FISA warrant last summer to spy on the Trump campaign under the pretext that Page was alleged to be a Russian agent. https:/www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-fo
rmer-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?utm_term=.
ee32735cc79b
The Russian UN employee was charged with two others in 2015. There is an interesting section in the Justice Department press release that accompanied the March 11, 2016 conviction of one of the three Russians. Seemingly overlooked by everyone in the major media are intriguing suggestions in that DOJ document that Page is not the unwitting Russian pawn he was later made out to be, and was instead quite aware of his role as a willing informant in FBI operations: https:www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/evgeny-buryakov-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-connectio
n-conspiracy-work
BURYAKOV worked in New York with at least two other SVR agents, Igor Sporyshev and Victor Podobnyy. From November 22, 2010, to November 21, 2014, Sporyshev officially served as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York. From December 13, 2012, to September 12, 2013, Podobnyy officially served as an attaché to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. The investigation, however, showed that Sporyshev and Podobnyy also worked as officers of the SVR. For their roles in the charged conspiracy, Sporyshev and Podobnyy were charged along with BURYAKOV in January 2015. However, Sporyshev and Podbonyy no longer lived in the United States and thus were not arrested.
BURYAKOV’s Co-Conspirators Are Recorded Inside the SVR’s New York “Residentura”
During the course of the investigation, the FBI recorded Sporyshev and Podobnyy speaking inside the SVR’s offices in New York, known as the “Residentura.”
The FBI obtained the recordings after Sporyshev attempted to recruit an FBI undercover employee (“UCE-1”), who was posing as an analyst from a New York-based energy company. In response to requests from Sporyshev, UCE-1 provided Sporyshev with binders containing purported industry analysis written by UCE-1 and supporting documentation relating to UCE-1’s reports, as well as covertly placed recording devices. Sporyshev then took the binders to, among other places, the Residentura.
During subsequent recorded conversations, Sporyshev and Podobnyy discussed, among other things, Sporyshev’s SVR employment contract and his official cover position, their work as SVR officers, and the FBI’s July 2010 arrests of 10 SVR agents in the United States, known as the “Illegals.”
While there seem to be some remarkable coincidences, it is not known what relationship Page, referred to in court documents as “MALE 1” had with the second unnamed figure, “UCE-1” who fits the same profile as Page. Most likely, the FBI used Page to introduce one of its own employees pretending to be a coworker in Page’s NYC-based energy trading company, who subsequently passed bugged binders to the Russians. Page was previously reported in court papers to have been identified as “MALE-1.” Indeed, the FBI Affidavit in the Polodny case states that two FBI Special Agents interviewed Male-1, Carter Page, on June 13, 2013, and it only stands to reason they had use for Page thereafter.
The Major Media’s Curious Lack of Curiosity
It’s all the more curious that Page should have three years later attached himself to the Trump campaign, and become the central figure in “Russiagate,” and provided the pretext to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil an American outside the U.S. Stranger still, that none of this has previously been remarked upon about Page in any major media.
Here’s how ABC portrayed these events when it broke part of story about Page in April: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-campaign-advisor-carter-page-targeted-russian-spies/story?id=46
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Undercover FBI agents lured Buryakov and his SVR associates, Igor Sporyshev and Podobnyy, into a trap by masquerading as well-placed business sources ripe for recruitment while using physical and electronic surveillance to gather enough information to build their case.
No reference by Newsweek or ABC to an FBI undercover employee posing as an energy analyst or the bugged binders, which suggests that Page (or an FBI employee pretending to work with him) had more than a passive role in the electronic surveillance placed by the Bureau.
It is also significant that Page is the only person within the Trump circle for whom there appears to be strong evidence a FISA warrant was ever actually issued, permitting legal FBI surveillance, electronic evesdropping that it was strongly asserted had nabbed other Trump associates.
It should also be noted that the rest of the intercepts that have been alluded to as part of the Rice “unmaskings” were carried out after a FISA Court reportedly refused in June 2016 to issue a warrant application seeking broad surveillance of figures in the Trump campaign. Several media have reported that after the initial warrant request was denied a much narrower FISA request for surveillance of messages from two Moscow banks was granted in October.
Any surveillance conducted outside of the confines of the Page warrant and the possible second warrant was conducted without FISA authorization, and was in plain defiance of the court’s June warrant denial.
Mr. Page has certainly been useful to someone, but the corporate media isn’t telling you that.
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Originally posted at https:jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/heres-the-backstory-behind-russiagate-the-msm-wont-tell-yo
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