Trump-Russia: FBI believed Carter Page 'collaborated and conspired' with Moscow

• 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.

Trump Brings Jobs to the U.S

President-elect Donald Trump has already set into motion maneuvers to stabilize the American economy and in turn, has guaranteed job within the United States.  Prior to his inauguration, Donald Trump has been meeting with and negotiating major business proposals that will bring manufacturing back to the U.S. as seen just after the second world war.  What makes a country great is when manufacturing and production are at its highest.  Jobs are than available to everyone with competitive wages.  In turn, the country exports more than it purchases goods from other countries as imports thus increasing its gold reserves and strengthening the value of their currency.  In the previous decades, the United States has done the exact opposite of this weakening the country as a whole meanwhile enriching just a few individuals that hold office in this country.

Chinese Company Relocates to U.S.

With word of some of the trade deals that President-elect Donald Trump has already been negotiating the head of a Chinese-based company has decided to relocate his business to the United States.  China; renown for slave labor this company head has decided that it is more beneficial for the business to produce within the United States where it must adhere to various state-to-state labor laws and even workers unions.  This naturally means Americans will have a chance at the possibility of more work while simultaneously watching the economy slowly begin to stabilize.

The Importance of Increasing Production and Exports

During the American Civil War, the world got its first glimpse of how important production and exports are to a nation.  The North; which had a capital on factories, produced more war equipment than the South could while blockading and starving the South likewise.  Thus production and the export of this production helped the North win the Civil War.  Later during the Second World War the American economy again entered into an unprecedented level of mass production thus ultimately winning the war and even experiencing a major economic boom for decades afterwards.

In fact it was well known that the average American man could support his family with nothing but a high school diploma and a full time job.  This was how well the economy was.  Wives didn’t have to work unless they wanted to and children grew up experiencing childhood at its finest.  Unlike nowadays where both mother and fathers have to work in order to keep the household afloat while children grow up estranged from their parents primarily being raised by the state’s educational system.   It is time to change this.

Hiring A Business Man to Fix the Economy

The real problems Americans face is the inevitable collapse of the American economy.  Not middle easterners invading North America in a “Normandy”-like style invasion or the growing tensions with Russia as Russia has stated very clearly that it is we (the United States) who are meddling with their neighbors in their backyard.  So it made sense that Americans voted for the candidate that they believed would best fix their problems.  Of course, that was Donald Trump; a renown business man.

For a very long time decisions regarding the lives of innocent civilians in other countries to be taken in conflict over land and resources have been made by the politicians, big businesses and backdoor dealings between these two parties, not the American people.  Once these decisions are made to invade an “enemy” country over a false flag attack sponsored by our own government it is the poorest of the poor civilians that are targeted for military service as a means to “better” their lot in life.  For now the country will get to wait and see as more progress is made that may or may not benefit the American society and middle class as a whole.

Sources:

Chinese Company Moves Empire to Ohio by Alex Jones Channel