Carter William Page (born June 3, 1971) is an American oil industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 Presidential election campaign.[1] Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.[2][3][4] He has been a focus of the 2017 Special Counsel investigation into links between Trump associates and Russian officials and Russian interference on behalf of Trump during the 2016 Presidential election.[2]
Carter Page was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 3, 1971,[5] the son of Allan Robert Page and Rachel (Greenstein) Page.[6][7] His father was from Galway, New York, and his mother was from Minneapolis.[8] His father was a manager and executive with the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company.[9] Page was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated from Poughkeepsie's Our Lady of Lourdes High School in 1989.[6]
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.[10][11][12] During his senior year at the Naval Academy, he worked as a researcher for the House Armed Services Committee.[13] He served in the Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission.[13] In 1994, he completed a master of arts degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown University.[13]
After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations[10] and in 2001 he received an MBA from New York University.[14] 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,[3] and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch's energy and power department in New York.[11] 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.[3]
After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy Capital with partner James Richard and a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko.[15][3] The fund operates out of a Manhattan co-working space shared with a booking agency for wedding bands, and as of late 2017, Page was the firm's sole employee.[2] Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project.[2][3]
Page received his Ph.D. in 2012 from SOAS, University of London, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner.[2][10] His doctoral thesis was rejected twice before ultimately being accepted by different examiners. One of his original examiners later said Page was unfamiliar with "basic concepts" such as Marxism and state capitalism.[16] He sought unsuccessfully to publish his doctoral thesis as a book; a reviewer described it as "very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument."[2] He ran an international-affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University.[17][18]
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.[19]Stephen Sestanovich later described Page's foreign-policy views as having "an edgy Putinist resentment" and a sympathy to Russian leader Vladimir Putin's criticisms of the US.[2] Over time, Page became increasingly critical of US foreign policy toward Russia, and more supportive of Putin, with a US official describing Page as "a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did".[4] Page is frequently quoted by Russian state television, where he is presented as a "famous American economist".[3] In 2013, Russian intelligence operatives attempted to recruit Page, and one described him as an "idiot".[2][20] News accounts in 2017 indicated that because of these ties to Russia, Page had been the subject of a FISA warrant in 2014, at least two years earlier than was indicated in the stories concerning his role in the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald Trump.[21][22]
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.[23][24] He has also written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University in the UK.[3]
Page served as a foreign-policy advisor to Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign. In September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials investigated alleged contacts between Page and Russian officials subject to U.S. sanctions, including Igor Sechin.[4] After news reports began to appear describing Page's links to Russia and Putin's government, Page stepped down from his role in the Trump campaign.[1][25]
Shortly after Page resigned from the Trump campaign, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Page's communications.[26] To issue the warrant, a federal judge concluded there was probable cause to believe 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.[27]
In January 2017, Page's name appeared repeatedly in a leaked contract intelligence dossier containing unsubstantiated allegations of close interactions between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.[28][29][30][31] By the end of January 2017, Page was under investigation by the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. He has denied wrongdoing.[32] The Trump Administration has attempted to distance itself from Page, denying that he was in fact an "advisor" to Trump.[2]
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.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35][36][37]
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.[38] He also indicated that campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his trip.[39] 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.[38][40][41] 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.[35] 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.[35] 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.[42]
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.[43] 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.[44] The dossier alleges that Sechin offered Page the brokerage fee from the sale of up to 19 percent of Rosneft if he worked to roll back Magnitsky Act economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia in 2012.[44][45][46] 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.[44]