GET CARTER
THE first time I ever met Jeannie Rhee, I saw her in the courthouse hallway outside my grand jury room. I politely introduced myself, “Hello, I’m Carter Page.” Rather than identify herself, she angrily scowled and pointed a finger toward my holding pen area. Like a cold prison warden she barked orders . . . I was starting to get the picture of how the day was likely to go down.
I had got a sense of her lieutenant Rush Atkinson’s place in the pecking order by watching him shadow Rhee. Given no advance warning of whom I was dealing with, I looked up stories about the Mueller team during one of my breaks that day. The reason for Rhee’s aggressive stance quickly became quite clear. As Business Insider reported, “Rhee represented Hillary Clinton in a 2015 lawsuit that sought access to her private e-mails. She also represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 racketeering lawsuit.”
Worse, the profile continued: “Rhee . . . has doled out more than $16,000 to Democrats since 2008, CNN reported. She maxed out her donations both in 2015 and 2016 to Clinton’s presidential campaign, giving a total of $5,400.”
I struggled to comprehend: One of the financial funders who contributed cash to the Democratic organizations which launched this whole domestic political-intelligence operation is also among the same people now effectively leading this official US government interrogation against me?
Such Democrat campaign donations were the same fuel that paid for the DNC-funded consultant Christopher Steele’s infamous Dodgy Dossier. The fact that such individuals had now found a way to perpetrate this vindictive harassment against their political adversaries in their official roles as US government prosecutors seemed to defy common sense and common decency.
As I put two and two together, I was almost in a state of shock. In just a few minutes, my break would end, and I would have to face Rhee again . . . I began to fully understand the frivolous game that I had been forced to play. Though I was hardly comforted, things were starting to make sense.
By comparison, Lawrence Rush Atkinson reportedly only gave a paltry $200 donation to the 2016 Clinton campaign. A token sum to be sure, but that was enough to reveal his loyalties. Clearly Rush had not yet graduated to the big leagues of political prosecutions.
I faced about twenty grand jurors — each of them studying my face as I spoke, looking for any sign of intimidation or deception. The relatively junior lawyer Rush Atkinson took up much of the grunt work in the interrogation. It immediately became clear who was driving the train. Atkinson would ask me a question, and Rhee would furiously write her next question on a yellow sticky note, her choice of communication medium, and slap it in front of Atkinson for him to verbalize. He would get something
wrong in her eyes, and she would wrathfully scribble a correction and slap it down even harder.
I started to wonder: If there’s something she wants to know, why doesn’t she just go ahead and ask all of these foolish questions herself ?
. . . I eventually figured out the likely reason for her methods. Similar
to many courthouse forums, the Democrat prosecutors were sitting next to a court reporter who kept record of who said what throughout the day. Certainly it would be a bad look if some independent-minded attorney sitting somewhere in the Justice Department noted that the stenographer had transcribed
I struggled to comprehend: One of the financial funders of . . . this whole domestic political intelligence operation . . . is leading this official US government interrogation against me?
records showing Jeannie Rhee was the one asking all the highly aggressive and blatantly political gotcha questions. She clearly intended to trip me up but didn’t want to be the one doing so on the official record.
Atkinson humbly complied with the yellow stickies and recited, as best he could, the questions that Rhee demanded. After going through an additional stack of stickies, the junior prosecutor meekly noted how prolific her requests were. As the day wore on and Jeannie grew increasingly irritable, she would slap the yellow stickies down even harder next to Rush’s photocopies of my personal documents.
The show-trial format of the day had all the trappings of a quiz-bowlstyled game show . . . the game cards for this contest consisted of big stacks of paper that the partisan special counsel team had printed out. For some reason, one of the quirks of the grand jury game prevented contestants such as me from bringing even one sheet of paper into the arena. I felt as if I were being asked to participate in a game of “What’s in my pocket?”
Though it was over two years ago, my memory of the day’s events is as vivid as ever. Rhee, working through Atkinson, impatiently demanded to know things like: In January 2016, you wrote an e-mail referring to someone without mentioning their name. Who exactly did you have in mind then?
As I tried explaining the details of what really happened, one of the grand jurors sitting right before me slightly nodded his head in agreement before I got rudely cut off by my questioners. At least one member of the jury wasn’t buying this political charade.
MUELLER’S prosecutors left Page in limbo for 16 months following his grand jury appearance. They pursued cases against several Trump advisers, including Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone — none on charges of Russian collusion. For all that time, Page could never be sure he was in the clear.
On March 24, 2019, Attorney General Barr told Congress that Mueller had completed his work without uncovering evidence that any American had conspired with Russia to further Trump’s presidential chances. For Page, the threat of legal jeopardy had finally passed.
But, as Page writes in his book, he wanted more: vindication:
Not a single crime related to the campaign or related to Russia in any significant way was identified. All the partisan Democratic challengers who tried prosecuting this series of show trials started to limp back to their old jobs without anything material to show for their expensive efforts.
Though my time in the barrel was now over, I still didn’t feel that I had seen justice. In fact, Mueller’s testimony [to Congress in July 2019] only deepened the sense that so many Americans had been betrayed. I had eagerly supported Robert Mueller’s appointment, believing that his record of military service and his prior reputation would help clear my name. But by the time his investigation came to a close, with no evidence of any wrongdoing, the Mueller Report still let suspicions hang around President Trump, myself, and countless other innocent souls. Watching Mueller on television showed me how deep the decay ran in our justice system. The man I had thought would exonerate me was evidently not the person running the show. And after all this time, justice still hadn’t been served.
Charges have been filed against former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith (top left inset), who worked for special counsel Robert Mueller (top right) to surveil Carter Page (far left), a Trump adviser. Federal prosecutors Jeannie Rhee (bottom left) and L. Rush Atkinson (bottom right) led the interrogation ofPage—who now wants vindication.