Who is Trump’s ex-aide at centre of furore?
He is the mysterious aide who just won’t go away: at the centre of the furore over a controversial memo Donald Trump greenlit for release on Friday is Carter Page (right), who once served as a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s presidential campaign.
The so-called Nunes memo, named for House intelligence chairman Devin Nunes, describes how the FBI sought and received a warrant to conduct surveillance on Page, whom the bureau had been following since at least 2013, owing to his contacts with Russian intelligence operatives.
Page, a native of Poughkeepsie, New York, who made trips to Moscow during the campaign and the presidential transition, has been described as an energy consultant and businessman with an interest in foreign policy.
Page was also described by a Russian intelligence agent who was trying to recruit him as an asset for Moscow in 2013 in another way: “idiot”. “He wants to meet when he gets back,” the agent, Victor Podobnyy, said in a conversation recorded by US intelligence. “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language.” In eight hours of testimony before Nunes’s committee late last year, Page flatly denied the accusation that he had colluded with Russia in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, though he admitted communicating with senior Trump campaign officials about a July 2016 trip to Moscow in which he met with at least one top Russian government official. Page told congressional investigators that the meeting was short and inconsequential. He also downplayed his role in the Trump campaign, saying he did not know Trump personally but learned from studying him on video. Page, 47, is a graduate of the US Naval Academy with an MBA from New York University. He speaks Russian and got to know the country as an employee of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office from 2004 to 2007. Page’s own account of Russian contacts during the campaign, and his admission that he discussed those contacts with top Trump aides, has not only contradicted Trump’s denials of any contacts but also fuelled suspicions of coordination of some kind.