Carter Page was the face of the Russia probe.
More than 3 years later, it all fell apart

• The application to spy on Carter Page was based on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent. We’ve now learned that Page had been working with the CIA, and had already reported to them the “suspicious” contact with Russian officials that was used to justify spying. After the OIG report came out Monday stating he was working for another U.S. government agency, Page himself told Sean Hannity that it was the CIA.

• The Yahoo News article with anonymous sources stating Page was a Russian agent was in fact based on the Steele dossier, and yet was used in the application to corroborate the Steele dossier

• Contrary to countless journalists, the Steele dossier was the only source used to justify surveillance on Carter Page and the Trump campaign. Read a Twitter thread showing all the journalists who insisted the dossier played a minor role or had been corroborated by the FBI.

• The FBI probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, included recording the reactions by candidate Donald Trump to the now-disputed counterintelligence “defensive briefing” he received in August 2016 about the Russians possibly operating an intel operation to interfere in the election. In other words, those briefings were used to gather intel as part of Crossfire Hurricane. A counterintelligence briefing is normally given to a member of government or a private citizen who possesses information that might be valuable to a foreign government, and who might be in danger of encountering a targeted operation to get that information.

• Horowitz confirmed that the Steele dossier author, Christopher Steele, was “feeding info to the Clinton campaign” and getting paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to talk to reporters.

• To this day, Page has not been charged with a crime.

By Tatiana Prophet
Editor-in-Chief

One of the biggest shockers of the DOJ inspector general’s report released Monday was that Carter Page — a key Trump associate under suspicion during the FBI 2016 election probe — had a prior relationship with the CIA before the FBI began scrutinizing his activities in Russia and elsewhere. What’s even worse, those who made the application to continue to surveil him “Omitted Page’s prior placement with another U.S. government agency,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in his report.

Horowitz confirmed that their first surveillance application didn’t cover the agency’s “prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an ‘operational contact’ for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior cont acts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application;

Horowitz listed seven total “errors” found in the first application; and ten errors in the three subsequent renewals. Page, who consults with energy companies, was subjected to intense scrutiny including a piece in the Washington Post that FBI lawyer Lisa Page pushed onto her buddy Devlin Barrett anonymously — practically fingering him as “the link” from Trump to Russia.

“This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump associate was in touch with Russian agents,” wrote Barrett and his colleagues Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous (Entous would go on to write a softball piece packed with juicy irrelevant details about Hunter Biden’s conflicts of interest for The New Yorker in July 2019). Such contacts are now at the center of an investigation into whether the campaign coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

In the fourth and last surveillance renewal application, “despite being reminded by the other agency in June 2017, prior to the filing of the final renewal application, about Page's past status with that other agency; instead of including this information in the final renewal application, the OGC Attorney altered an email from the other agency so that the email stated t hat Page was ‘not a source’ for the other agency, which the FBI affiant relied upon in signing the final renewal application.”

Even when they wrote the first warrant application, in October 2016, the FBI told the surveillance judge that he was a Russian agent. “The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power, described in detail below. The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. Department of State.”

Apparently the State Department could confirm Page’s contacts with Russia, but not that he was actually working for the United States.

The investigation into Russia’s interference in the election and any conspiracy with the Trump campaign was called Crossfire Hurricane. It began in July 2016, the FBI has maintained, with special agent in charge of counterintelligence Peter Strzok leading it. “Crossfire Hurricane” involved phone and e-mail surveillance obtained through a warrant with the Foreign Intelligent Surveillance Court, which allows for the surveillance of U.S. citizens if they are communicating with a foreign agent and if their relationship to that person is relevant to the investigation.

The predicate for surveillance was: that 1) Trump campaign associate Carter Page had multiple contacts in and with Russia; and 2) that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos allegedly knew about the imminent release of the Democratic National Committee e-mails because he mentioned it to then-Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in a bar in London in April of the same year.

Read the full report (or executive summary) here.

While Horowitz demonstrates that all four FISA applicaitons — including the first — were based on faulty information, and ignored exculpatory evidence (Page’s cooperation with another U.S. agency), the inspector general still ruled that the start of the probe was legitimate.

He also concluded that the actions he listed showing the flimsy nature of the justification for surveillance did not indicate any political bias.

If that is so, what do they indicate?

Cover photo originally printed in The New York Times April 19, 2017:
”Ever since F.B.I. investigators discovered in 2013 that a Russian spy was trying to recruit an American businessman named Carter Page, the bureau maintained an occasional interest in Mr. Page. So when he became a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign last year and gave a Russia-friendly speech at a prestigious Moscow institute, it soon caught the bureau’s attention.”