- Former Trump adviser denies being ‘agent of foreign power’
- President accuses own government of serious malpractice
Carter Page was a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The Trump administration has released documents related to the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, as part of an investigation into whether he colluded with Russia to undermine the 2016 US presidential election.
A surveillance application filed by the FBI in October 2016, a month before the election, said: “The FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.”
Page has consistently denied working as an agent of the Russia and has not been charged with any crime after almost two years of investigation.
In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, he reiterated his denials and described the FBI’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court as “so ridiculous it’s beyond words”. He accused law enforcement of misleading the court.
“I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination,” he said.
The 412 pages of released documents, heavily redacted and made public by the FBI late on Saturday, included a number of surveillance applications and warrants. The documents said “the FBI believes that the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Trump’s campaign. They also said Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers”.
On CNN the former foreign policy adviser and energy consultant declined to answer four times whether he had relationships with Russian officials and declined to elaborate on an academic letter he wrote in 2013, in which he described himself as an “informal adviser” to the Kremlin.
According to allegations in the documents Page, who lived in Moscow between 2004 and 2007, met a number of senior allies to President Vladimir Putin during a July 2016 trip to Russia. The claims were first made in the now notorious dossier authored by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
It is alleged that Page met Igor Sechin, a Russian energy executive, and discussed lifting western sanctions imposed in response to the 2013 Ukrainian crisis. The application also alleges that Page met with Igor Divyekin, a Russian intelligence operative, and discussed compromising material on Hillary Clinton.
On Sunday Page denied ever meeting Sechin or Divyekin and described the specific allegations as “totally false”.
The released documents include applications and renewal warrants filed in 2017, while Donald Trump was in office . The president denies collusion with Russia. On Sunday morning, he accused his own government of serious malpractice.
The president wrote on Twitter that the documents were “ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of ‘Justice’ and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!”
He added: “Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the [Democratic National Committee] … Republicans must get tough now. An illegal Scam!”
The top secret documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request lodged by a group of media outlets. But, pointing to intense political wrestling over the files, Trump credited the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch for “being successful in getting the Carter Page Fisa documents”.
Republican lawmakers have claimed the FBI overreached when it sought a warrant to monitor Page in October 2016, shortly after he left the Trump campaign. Senior GOP politicians, including House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes, have alleged that the FBI relied too heavily on Steele’s research and did not declare in the warrant that the dossier was opposition research.
On Saturday house Democrats said the release of the FBI documents further disproved such Republican criticism. “These documents provide clear evidence of ‘Russia’s coordination with Carter Page’, a high-ranking Trump campaign official, ‘to undermine and improperly and illegally influence the 2016 US presidential election’,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.
The justice department’s inspector general said in March he would review whether the FBI and the department followed proper procedures when they applied for a warrant.
The documents released show the FBI disclosed that the Steele dossier was paid for by people looking to discredit Trump, and said Steele had “provided reliable information”in the past. The firm Steele worked for, Fusion GPS, was initially hired by a conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon, to conduct research on Republican candidates including Trump. The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign helped fund the work later.
Clinton, who beat Trump by 3m ballots in the popular vote but lost in the electoral college, spoke in New York on Saturday. She said Trump’s behaviour around his meeting with Vladmir Putin in Helsinki this week was a “mystery” and warned that sources had told her attacks on the 2018 midterms could spread to electoral infrastructure.
Last week, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, a federal grand jury charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking Democratic computer networks in 2016, in the most detailed US accusation yet that Moscow meddled in the election to help Trump.
The indictments followed charges against 13 other Russians and three Russian companies on counts of conspiring to interfere with the election, which were issued earlier in the year.
Four former Trump aides have been indicted. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn and foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos are co-operating with authorities, as is Rick Gates, deputy to former campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort is in jail, awaiting trial on financial charges he denies.
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