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Carter Page’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, unsurprisingly, was largely a mess-I’m presuming this is someone Adam Schiff will want to hear from again. Certainly if nothing else he proved the old adage: someone who represents himself has a fool for a client-that seems to apply doubly, indeed, triply to someone like Carter Page-who is quite like Carter Page? It’s not for nothing that the Russian operatives trying to recruit him in 2013 called him an idiot.

Even Republican Trey Gowdy remarked on Page’s strange quibbling when asked about meetings with the Russians. 

“The only brief interaction I had with any Russian government official is after this commencement program or after the—after my commencement speech on that Friday in July—I believe it was July 8th—I briefly said hello to Arkadiy Dvorkovich,” Page said.

“Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, quizzed Page about that, noting that Page said last week on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show that he had only spoken to “men on the street.” Did he not consider Dvorkovich an official, Schiff asked? Page replied that he had not met with him, only greeted him.”

Schiff pointed out that in a memo to Trump campaign staffers after the trip, he had written, “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.” He also wrote an email to Trump campaign staffers Tera Dahl and J.D. Gordon, saying, “On a related front, I’ll send you guys a readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential administration here.”Page acknowledged writing all this, but still claimed he had not spoken more than a few words to Dvorkovich, and had instead derived his insights from hearing speeches. Page was also fuzzy about an encounter with a man who works for the Russian oil giant Rosneft, whom he called an old friend, saying he could not recall who had contacted the other or whether they had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia.Schiff summed the situation up cleanly: “Were you being honest in your communication with the campaign? Are you being honest in your testimony? Because it doesn’t seem possible for both to be true.”

Schiff wasn’t the only one baffled. Republican Trey Gowdy, who frequently sounds incredulous during his portions of the testimony, asked, “I didn’t think I’d ever be going through this with anyone, but we’ve got to, I guess. You seem to draw a distinction between a meeting, a greeting, a conversation, and you hearing a speech.”

“It’s just one example of how Page comes across as hopelessly self-aggrandizing throughout the testimony. He brags about his connections and credentials, dropping references to Harvard, Cambridge, and New York universities, and even noting his Delta frequent-flyer status. Describing his several email accounts, Page mentioned receiving many emails from Gary Sick, a respected Middle East scholar at Columbia University. Reached by email, Sick told me he’d briefly met Page in the 1990s or early 2000s and had not had any contact since, and that the emails in question came from a listserv of some 2,000 people.”

“There develops a strange dichotomy, in which Page presents himself as an important and respected man in Russia, invited to give a commencement speech independent of his work for the Trump campaign, and yet also downplays his importance to the Trump team, calling himself a very junior staffer. (Gowdy, again: “Mr. Page, I wrote down: volunteer, unpaid, informal, unofficial. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell your role was with the Trump campaign.”)

“Trump and his aides, as well as Page himself, have tried to argue that whatever Page did had no connection with the campaign—they were the rogue actions of a low-level figure. And while the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, from George Papadopoulos to Jeff Sessions to Jared Kushner to Michael Flynn to Paul Manafort, seem hard to comprehend as coincidences, it does seem plausible from Page’s marble-mouthed explanations that he was puffing up his role and importance and connections to Russian figures in order to enhance his status with the Trump campaign.”

Of course, that’s what the Trump campaign would want you to think: that Carter Page is too odd and flaky a character to have been anyone  importance in the campaign. But they say the same thing about Papadopoulos-and yet there are the emails to prove the centrality of both of them in the Spring and early Summer of the campaign in 2016. And the big picture is that they were two fifths of Trump’s original campaign foreign policy/national security team.

But a seemingly small detail in what Page said to the HSPCI struck me as moment of Serendipity: Page boasted of emails to Gary Sick.

 

But it seems fittingly for him to have emailed Gary Sick-or misrepresented emails to Gary Sick-as Sick was-as documented in (Chapter A) one of the major proponents of the theory that Reagan colluded with Iran in 1980 to delay the release of the hostages to guarantee a win vs. Jimmy Carter. Of course, Carter Page-along with Papadopoulos-has been central to the theory that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016.

So here’s one instance of GOP Presidential Collusion 2.0 and GOP Presidential Collusion 3.0 bisecting. Which seems a little uncanny-and fitting. But it also reminds me of what Sick wrote in his book on Reagan Iran collusion 27 years ago regarding Richard Brennke-an Oregon businessman who had claimed to be at a collusion meeting between the Reagan campaign and Iran in Paris in October of 1980. Brennke was widely seen as a flake and an unreliable witness even by those like Gary Sick or Robert Parry who believed there was a Reagan-Iran conspiracy.

“When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a “contractor,” who may be required to carry out tasks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things, a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, for example); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propoensity for exaggeration and trouble.”

“Essentially, such a free-lancer is a skilled Walter Mitty, who delights in  possessing arcane knowledge and who imagines himself the instrument  that secretly drives events from behind the scrim of history. It is a profile,  alas, of a less-than-credible witness.”

Pg. 214.

Of course, this characteristic of being a less-than-credible witness is a feature not a bug-that way if the ‘free lancer’ ever gets turned around-either they want to tell the truth or they are being compelled to by investigators they won’t be believed. Just so. Yet here’s what was so amazing about Brennke. Everyone in journalism dismissed him as a flake and conjurer but yet as we see in (Chapter B) when the government tried to get him convicted as a perjurer for insisting that he-along with then George Bush Sr-were at that October 1980 meeting in Paris, it failed. The jury stated that they actually believed Brennke-who again, the MSM journalists had such fun in highlighting how unreliable Brennke was-that there was a Paris meeting and he was there. 

But this profile of a ‘free lancer’ is similar to what is called a ‘cutout.’ Much of the defense of Trump has been to dismiss guys like Carter Page as tangential to the campaign. But, again, like with the free lancers, it’s helpful to have folks like Page or Papadopoulous-or Mifsud, or Rob Goldstone out in front on these conspiracies as it’s easier to achieve distance from them later.

Speaking of Papadopoulos, he’s not exactly representing his fellow Coffee Boys very well.

Looks like he’s going to prison:

UPDATE: As noted in Chapter A there hasn’t been a lot of Carter Page news recently which has led the MSM-based on its covering the investigation like an ostrich to presume that Page wasn’t important to Russian Conspiracy. However, the dossier was pretty uncanny in its assertion that Page was offered a 19% stake in Rosnet in exchange for getting Trump to change the GOP Convention platform.

Of course, the platform would be changed and per Jeff Gordon-Jeff Sessions’ deputy-Trump is who asked for the change. Note that Page reported to Gordon-Sessions. After the election a stake of 19.5% in Rosnet was sold to the Qatar investment fund-the same fund that initially turned down Jared Kushner’s father’s request for a loan then in a total coincidence reversed itself after the Trump Russia House approved the Qatar blockade.

In yet another total coincidence Page was present at Rosnet’s headquarters the day the stake was sold. It certainly seems plausible that Page was both the individual who ultimately went on the Russia trip that Papadopoulos had previously been trying to get Trump to go on-Manafort had told the Coffee Boy Trump wasn’t going but Manafort was quite plausibly saying a cutout was needed-a la Carter Page.

So Page is plausibly integral to the quid in the quid pro quo-what Russia wanted for its assistance. Again, the MSM covers Russian Conspiracy like an ostrich-as Page hasn’t been charged with a crime it’s presumed there must be no there there.

But what’s so enigmatic about Page is we don’t know if he’s even been interviewed by Mueller-in his Congressional testimony he refused to say if he’d been interviewed or not. One the one hand you wonder why if the answers no he wouldn’t say it. Of course, if he’s not that could be bad news as it might mean he’s a subject/target.

Again, the wrong presumption is that because we hear nothing there is nothing-we have 5% of what Mueller has at best.

And Carter Page is one of Jerrold Nadler’s 81 names of Trump associates the Judiciary Committee wants documents from. 

 

 

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