Page denies working as Russian agent
WASHINGTON • Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Sunday denied he was an intelligence agent for Russia, after the release of usually secret documents showed federal investigators believed he was engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” on behalf of Russia.
Page’s denial, on CNN’s State of the Union, was his first public response to the release on Saturday of secret applications for federal wiretaps on him.
The documents — still heavily redacted — showed that federal investigators were looking into Page’s possible connections with Russia as early as 2013, long before Trump named him as an adviser to his presidential campaign in March 2016.
On Sunday, Page said that it was “ridiculous” and a “complete joke” to believe he had been an agent of the Russian government.
“I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination,” Page said on CNN. That echoed President Trump’s own statements on the documents — issued via Twitter from Trump’s golf club in New Jersey — that the wiretap on Page was part of politically motivated spying on Trump’s presidential campaign.
Page himself ducked questions about what, exactly, his connections to Russia had been.
When CNN’s Jake Tapper noted that Page had once called himself an “informal adviser” to the Kremlin, Page responded: “You know, informal, having some conversations with people. I mean, this is really nothing.”
“I’ve never been anywhere near what’s being described here” in the released documents, Page said. “There was nothing in terms of nefarious behaviour.”
Also Sunday, Republican senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina urged Trump to take a harder line against Russian President Vladimir Putin, a few days after Trump seemed deferential to Putin after a summit meeting in Helsinki.
On CBS, Graham — a sometime Trump ally — seemed to be speaking directly to Trump, telling him to impose “new sanctions, heavy-handed sanctions” on Russia before Putin visits Washington.
Graham noted that Trump had changed his position about whether Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election: “He’s changed his mind four times this week.”
“The president gets this confused. If you suggest that Russians meddled in 2016, he goes to the idea that, ‘Well, I didn’t collude with them,’ ” Graham said.
Speaking directly to Trump again, he urged the president not to treat questions about Russian interference only as an attack on his own legitimacy. “Mr. President, they meddled in the election,” Graham said. “It could be us next. It could be some other power,” meaning that Republicans might be hurt, instead of helped.
The heavily redacted documents were released after a week of head-scratching developments related to Trump’s posture toward Russia.
Rubio, the author of a bill that would impose severe sanctions on Russia if it were determined to have interfered in a U.S. election, said Trump should approach meetings with Putin without illusions about the Russian leader’s endgame.
“He’s interested in gaining advantage at our expense and to his benefit.”