Carter Page

Carter William Page (born June 3, 1971) is an American oil industry consultant. According to Donald Trump, Page was one of the individuals who advised him on foreign policy during the 2016 presidential campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a New York investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.

Early life
Carter Page was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 3, 1971, the son of Allan Robert Page and Rachel (Greenstein) Page. His father was from Galway, New York, and his mother was from Minneapolis. Allan Page received bachelor's and master's degrees from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and was a manager and executive with the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company. Carter Page was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated from Poughkeepsie's Our Lady of Lourdes High School in 1989.

Military
Page graduated in 1993 from the United States Naval Academy; he was a Distinguished Graduate (top 10% of his class) and was chosen for the Navy's Trident Scholar program, which gives selected officers the opportunity for independent academic research and study. During his senior year he worked as a researcher for the House Armed Services Committee. He served in the Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission. In 1994, he completed a master of arts degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown University.

Business
After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2001 he received an MBA from New York University. In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm's London office, was vice president of the company's Moscow office, and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch's energy and power department in New York. Page has stated that he worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading Russian energy companies; according to business people interviewed by Politico in 2016, Page's work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers.

After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy Capital with partner James Richard; another partner in that venture is a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko. The fund operated out of a Manhattan co-working space. Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project.

In 2012, Page received his PhD from the University of London. He has instructed at the college level; he ran an international affairs program at Bard College, and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University.

Foreign policy
In 1998, Page joined the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm, but left three months later. In 2017, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer recalled on his Twitter feed that Page's strong pro-Russian stance was "not a good fit" for the firm and that Page was its "most wackadoodle" alumnus.

Page was the recipient of an International Affairs Fellowship (1998–1999) from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and has remained a consistent participant and contributor there since his fellowship with at least 9 panel appearances for CFR events between 2007 and 2009. He has also written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University in the UK.

He has expressed views in support of Russian president Vladimir Putin and harshly criticized U.S. policy, and was characterized as "a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did" by a U.S. official. He is frequently quoted on Russian television as a "famous American economist".

In August 2017, news accounts indicated that Page had been the subject of a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in 2014.

Trump 2016 presidential campaign
Page was one of five people named by Donald Trump as his foreign policy advisors when he responded to a question in a March 2016 interview with the editors of The Washington Post. Despite this statement, members of Trump's campaign staff said in September 2016 that Page had never met or briefed Trump.

Mikhail Leontyev, spokesman for Russia's Rosneft, said in 2016 that Carter Page was "an extremely well-informed, authoritative expert on Russia" and that he had a good reputation in the oil industry.

In September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials investigated alleged contacts between Page and Russian officials subject to U.S. sanctions, including Igor Sechin. Page rejected the accusations and stepped down from his role in the Trump campaign.

Shortly afterwards the Federal Bureau of Investigation successfully obtained a warrant from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Page's communications. To issue the warrant, a federal judge concluded there was probable cause to believe the FBI's declarations that Page was a foreign agent knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence for the Russian government. Page was the only American who was directly targeted with a FISA warrant in 2016 as part of the Russia probe. The 90-day warrant was repeatedly renewed.

In January 2017, Page's name appeared repeatedly in a leaked Donald Trump–Russia dossier containing contract intelligence from former British Intelligence operative Christopher Steele. The dossier contained unsubstantiated allegations of close interactions between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. In January 2017, Page was under investigation by the FBI, CIA, NSA, ODNI, and FinCEN. He has denied wrongdoing.

In February 2017, Page stated that he had not met with Russian officials in 2016 but two days later he appeared to contradict himself and stated that he did not deny news reports that he had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio the same year.

In October 2017, Page said he would not cooperate with requests to appear before the Intelligence Committee and would assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He said this was because they were requesting documents dating back to 2010, and he did not want to be caught in a "perjury trap." He expressed the wish to testify before the committee in an open setting.

Testimony before the House Intelligence Committee
On November 2, 2017, Page testified to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that he had informed Jeff Sessions, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks and other Trump campaign officials that he was traveling to Russia to give a speech in July 2016.

Page testified that he had met with Russian government officials during this trip and had sent a post-meeting report via email to members of the Trump campaign. He also indicated that campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his trip. Page's testimony contradicted statements by Trump and his associates that no one from the campaign met with Russian officials or had any dealings with them in the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Sessions was an advisor on national security to the Trump campaign, and after Trump won, he nominated Sessions to serve as United States Attorney General. Page's testimony contradicted Sessions' testimony during his confirmation hearings in January and February 2017, in which he denied any knowledge of anyone from the Trump campaign interacting with anyone from Russia. Lewandowski, who had previously denied knowing Page or meeting him during the campaign, said after Page's testimony that his memory was refreshed and acknowledged that he had been aware of Page's trip to Russia.

Page also testified that as part of his July 2016 trip to Russia, he had met with Arkady Dvorkovich, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister, contradicting his previous statements not to have spoken to anyone connected with the Russian government. In addition, while Page denied a meeting with Igor Sechin, the president of state-run Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft as alleged in the Donald Trump–Russia dossier, he did say he met with Andrey Baranov, Rosneft's head of investor relations. The dossier alleges that Sechin offered Page a 19 percent stake in Rosneft if he worked to roll back Magnitsky Act economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia in 2012. Page testified that he did not "directly" express support for lifting the sanctions during the meeting with Baranov, but that he might have mentioned the proposed Rosneft transaction.