Carter Page

Carter William Page (born June 3, 1971) is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. 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.

Page was a focus of the 2017 Special Counsel investigation into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies and Russian interference on behalf of Trump during the 2016 presidential election. In April 2019, the Mueller report concluded that the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated in Russia's interference efforts. In December 2019, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Michael E. Horowitz, issued a report on his inquiry into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign and its ties to Russia. Horowitz found fault with specific aspects of the FBI's conduct, including omission of facts and inclusion of false statements to the FISA court when the FBI applied for warrants to conduct surveillance on Page.

In 2019, the Justice Department determined the last two of four FISA warrants to surveil Page were invalid. Page has filed four lawsuits; all were dismissed by courts.

In December 2019, Rosemary Collyer, a senior U.S. district judge and one of four FISA Court judges who approved a warrant authorizing the wiretapping of Page, issued an order saying the FBI "provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI's case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. citizen named Carter W. Page".

Life and career

Carter Page was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 3, 1971, the son of Allan Robert Page and Rachel (Greenstein) Page. His father was from Galway, New York, and his mother was from Minneapolis. His father was a manager and executive with the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company.

Education and military service

Page was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated from Poughkeepsie's Our Lady of Lourdes High School in 1989. Page graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the United States Naval Academy in 1993; he graduated with distinction (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. During his senior year at the Naval Academy, he worked in the office of U.S. Representative Les Aspin as a researcher for the House Armed Services Committee. He served in the U.S. Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission, and attained the rank of lieutenant. In 1994, he completed an MA degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown University. After leaving active duty in 1998, Page was a member of the Navy's inactive reserve until 2004.

Further education and business

After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2001 he received an MBA degree from New York University. In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm's London office, was a vice president in the company's Moscow office, and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch's energy and power department in New York. 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.

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. 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. Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project. The building which contains Page's working space is connected to Trump Tower by an atrium, a fact Page referenced when describing his work for the 2016 Trump campaign in a 2017 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Page received a PhD degree from SOAS, University of London in 2012, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner. His doctoral dissertation on the transition of Asian countries from communism to capitalism was rejected twice before ultimately being accepted by new examiners. One of his original examiners later said Page "knew next to nothing" about the subject matter and was unfamiliar with "basic concepts" such as Marxism and state capitalism. He sought unsuccessfully to publish his dissertation 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." Page blamed the rejection on anti-Russian and anti-American bias. He later ran an international affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University. In more recent years, he has written columns in ''Global Policy Journal'', a publication of Durham University. In 2022, he earned an LLM (cum laude) from Fordham University School of Law.

Foreign policy and ties to Russia

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. 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 United States. Over time, Page became increasingly critical of United States foreign policy toward Russia, and more supportive of Putin, with a United States official describing Page as "a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did". Page is frequently quoted by Russian state television, where he is presented as a "famous American economist".

In August 2013, Page wrote, "Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda." Page described his role differently in 2018: "I sat in on some meetings, but to call me an advisor is way over the top."

Also in 2013, Evgeny Buryakov and two other Russians attempted to recruit Page as an intelligence source, and one of them, Victor Podobnyy, described Page as enthusiastic about business opportunities in Russia but an "idiot". "I also promised him a lot," Podobnyy reported to a fellow Russian intelligence officer at the time, according to an FBI transcript of their conversation, which was covertly recorded. "How else to work with foreigners?" Podobnyy added.

Page was the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

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