I’m not trying to steal Mark’s thunder, but I googled Carter Page just to get an update.
So there was this:
A top White House aide says he never met former Donald Trump adviser Carter Page during the more than 500 days he spent on the road with the president’s campaign.
“This Carter Page is a mess,” aide Dan Scavino tweeted on Saturday.
But there was also this, from September:
Page is the founder and managing partner of an investment fund called Global Energy Capital, and that he claims to have years of experience investing in Russia and the energy sector. As for his connection to Trump, when Page was reached for comment by the New York Times the day after Trump’s big reveal, he said he had been sending policy memos to the campaign and the paper said he “will be advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia.”
It gets better:
What I did find, however, is that while Page might not be helping Trump, Trump has been a significant help to Page. Since being named by Trump as an adviser, Page, who has spent his career trying to put together energy deals in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has finally begun to be noticed in the region. He is being treated in Russia as a person with potentially important ties in America. “He’s an extremely well-informed, authoritative expert on Russia,” says Mikhail Leontiev, a pro-Kremlin talking head and spokesman for Rosneft, Russia’s state oil giant. “People really respect him in this industry. He’s a very serious guy, and he has a good reputation.” According to the Yahoo report, U.S. intelligence believes Page had an audience with top Russian officials—including Rosneft head Igor Sechin—during a summer trip to Moscow. From what I could find about him, it’s hard to imagine he could have secured those meetings without that mention by Trump.
Any other updates?
JimC says
Though I could throw in Trump’s claim (probably true) that he never met Page.
JimC says
Would you describe someone you never met as one of your top advisers?
jconway says
He really had no credible experts at any duration of his campaign. So the ones who did a)had to be kinda shady to hitch their careers to him and b) aren’t the best experts. Stone, Manafort and Page all fit this pattern. So does Lewandowski, Conway, Bannon and Miller. With the ez legion of Stone, Trump only knew these people for less than a few weeks before he hired them. And in the case of Stone that guy hadn’t been involved in a real campaign since Reagan in 80′.
JimC says
n/t
seascraper says
McCarthyism alive and well on blue mass group. If you were going to throw out decades of moralistic preening over one lost election, can we at least stop reading The Crucible? It’s boring.
petr says
…
What traction McCarthy had, derived from telling whoppers about a subject people took seriously: espionage and foreign intervention in the US government.
Now, you want to hark back to the whoppers in order that we not take seriously the possibility of espionage and foreign intervention in the US government.
Yeah, that’s about par for the course for somebody who’d defend Trump.
Mark L. Bail says
Russia!
Russia, I tell you!
McCarthyism is defined as “a campaign or practice that endorses the use of unfair allegations and investigations.”
There have been several unfair allegations and investigations made by… umm, made by…
Which senator was it? Which elected official accused people on the Trump campaign of working for Russia? Help me out…
There are investigations by the FBI, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and they have blacklisted…
The closest we have to Joe McCarthy is Donald Trump, who was mentored by Roy Cohn.
If anyone runs out of morons, they’re in luck. We’ve got a commenter or two we can give away.
JimC says
Michael Flyyn.
Mark L. Bail says
I’ve been busy and a bit tired. I continue to follow things closely, but there hasn’t been enough for me to work on a post.
Here’s what I got:
Carter Page is a weird, weird guy. The word is that he’s being investigated as a “agent of a foreign power” as opposed to a “Agent of a Foreign Principal,” which is merely someone who is employed by a foreign country. In other words, Page is being investigated for what would be informally referred to as espionage. He’s made a lot of puzzling appearances in the news and said peculiar (strange, not suspicious) things.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort ran afoul of the law in failing to register as “Agent of a Foreign Principal.” There maybe an investigation into them working as “spies,” but there’s nothing specific on that. There are all kinds of rumors about them, but not much news. Manafort is a serious sleaze, and Flynn is nuts. No news there.
Reuters and the Daily Beast reported that the Senate Intel Committee doesn’t have enough staffers to carry out the Trump-Russia investigation. That’s true, says Lawfare, but not surprising, investigations often take time to build momentum. Their thinking is that the articles were attempts by interested parties to light a fire under it. Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings (House Oversight) sent a letter to the White House requesting documents concerning Michael Flynn. The White House declined the request.
It’s also clear now that Julian Assange was in bed with Russia.
Rumors. I’m including these rumors to give you an idea of how some people are thinking. The absolute truth value of rumors is zero or close to it. I find the value in the considering what kind of thing could have happened and seeing what various sources say. I’m new to Twitter, but I don’t accept anything I read about TrumpRussia at face value. I won’t write a post with rumors, unless evidence comes out to corroborate them or I write a post about sourcing and knowing online. Comments are comments.
1. One speculated crime of the Trump campaign is data laundering. I’d never heard of data laundering, but what it involves is taking stolen data and washing its sourcing away by passing it through other systems. The idea is that Russia stole data and the server in Trump Tower washed the data. I haven’t seen any evidence that this happened; however, the idea of data laundering was new to me.
2. Jason Chaffetz is leaving office because he was compromised by Russia. Again, this is sheer speculation. Announcing that he won’t run again and that he may not finish his term certainly raises some questions. This rumor, however, would seem to be contradicted by the fact that he’s calling for documents to drive the investigation.
joeltpatterson says
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/guess-who-came-dinner-flynn-putin-n742696
Mark L. Bail says
freaking weird. Jill Stein?