Who is Carter Page and why does he matter?
In 2016, the Trump campaign operation named Carter Page as a policy advisor. Prior to that, Carter Page had no connection to Donald Trump other than to have voluntarily sent policy papers to his campaign – although who his initial contact within the campaign was remains a mystery.
The FBI, on the other hand, certainly knew who Carter Page was.
The FBI began creating a file on Carter Page as far back as 2013. Not long after, Page became an informant in a case against three Russian spies that was prosecuted in a Manhattan federal court. In a criminal complaint filed in 2015 in federal court in Manhattan, the F.B.I. and prosecutors accused three Russians of working in the United States as spies. The court documents showed that those Russians tried to recruit Carter Page for unlawful purposes.
Prior to that and after working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, Page moved to Merrill Lynch’s Russia branch, where he was a vice president from 2004 to 2007. That was not Page’s first interest in Russia.
“Page’s interest in Russia dates to his youth in New York’s Hudson Valley. Watching a TV news program on arms control talks, he says he noticed that the adviser sitting behind President Ronald Reagan wore a Navy uniform. A few years later, Page enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy. He later worked in arms control at the Pentagon and completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Over his career, he’s earned three graduate degrees, including a Ph.D from SOAS University of London.
In 2000, Page took up investment banking, getting a job at Merrill Lynch’s capital-markets group in London. After impressing a colleague with his relationship with Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire, he says he was dispatched to help open the firm’s Moscow office in 2004.”
Returning to the FBI, Carter Page’s activities put him on their radar.
It is the FBI office in Seattle that runs undercover operations on Russians and Chinese, including with respect to industrial and economic espionage and recruiting. Larger counterintelligence operations are supervised and directed out of the FBI headquarters in WDC and NY. History on these operations goes back to at least to 1987. Interesting cases are found here that include threats/recruitments and espionage for perspective.
All of that brings us to the FISA application released as a result of the FOIA lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. Keep in mind that a warrant is not proof of any guilt, but rather possible evidence. It is indicative that the government is asking for permission to use additional tools to surveil someone.
Read the full story from NoisyRoom.net
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