Trump campaign aide Carter Page acknowledges meeting senior Russian officials in mid-2016

WASHINGTON – Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page met with Russia’s deputy prime minister and several legislators during a campaign-approved trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page has told the House Intelligence Committee in testimony that contradicted his previous public denials.

Russian officials pressed him on Donald Trump’s views on the U.S. sanctions that President Barack Obama had imposed on Russia in 2014 after its armed intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, Page said.

Page is the latest member of President Trump’s senior campaign team or White House staff to belatedly acknowledge direct contact with senior officials in President Vladimir Putin’s government during the 2016 campaign or after the election.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and several congressional committees are investigating whether those contacts – which Trump had repeatedly denied – directly aided Moscow’s attempts to interfere with the U.S. election campaign, a potential crime.

Page, a Manhattan-based energy consultant, was unknown to foreign policy veterans and diplomats in Washington when then-candidate Trump named him as one of his top foreign policy advisers in March 2016.

After his visit to Moscow that summer, Page told campaign officials in an email that he had received “incredible insights and outreach” from Deputy Prime Minister Arkadiy Dvorkovich and from members of the Russian legislature, known as the Duma.

“In a private conversation Dvorkovich expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems,” Page wrote.

He described his meeting with Dvorkovich as a “brief greeting” before he gave a speech to graduates at an academic institution in Moscow called the New Economic School.

Andrey Baranov, an executive with the Russian oil company Rosneft, may have brought up Moscow’s desire to see U.S. sanctions on Russia lifted, Page said.

He denied discussing the matter in depth. “He may have mentioned it to me. I had no discussions,” he said.

Page, who said he attended meetings with Trump but has never spoken with him, said that he had solicited advice from other campaign aides about what to say in his speech and said that his trip wasn’t a secret.

Page also proposed that Trump should go to Moscow to deliver the speech.

“If (Trump would) like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him,” he wrote to senior campaign official J.D. Gordon and another campaign aide in a May 16, 2016 email turned over to the committee.

Gordon said in a statement he discouraged Page from making a speech in Moscow. “He eventually went around me directly to campaign leadership,” Gordon said.

At a dinner on Capitol Hill, Page told then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, the campaign’s top foreign policy adviser and now U.S. attorney general, and Sam Clovis, another senior campaign official, about his plans to travel to Moscow a month before he left. After Page returned, he spoke to Clovis about the trip, Page said.

Clovis withdrew his name from a senior position at the Agriculture Department last week after court papers indicated he had encouraged a junior aide, George Papadopoulos, to visit Moscow if possible.

Papadopoulos, who was also present at the dinner, has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his separate contacts with Russians last year.

In his Moscow speech, Page slammed U.S. policy toward Russia in language that largely echoed Trump, who had repeatedly praised Putin and had vowed to seek warmer ties with Moscow.

“Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change,” Page said in his address, according to a video later posted online.

Page’s meetings in Moscow, at the height of the presidential campaign, was one of the factors that prompted the FBI to launch a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016, The New York Times has reported.

Page left the Trump campaign soon after he returned to Washington and since then the president and his advisors have tried to distance themselves from him.

In recent months, he had repeatedly denied to reporters that he met with Russian government officials in Moscow, insisting he met only with academics and business executives he had known for years.

But he acknowledged doing so to the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Page for seven hours behind closed doors on Nov. 2. The committee released a transcript late Monday.

A former Navy officer, Page had lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2007 while working as a junior investment banker for Merrill Lynch. He later started his own investment firm, Global Energy Capital.