Abuse and Power

How an Innocent American Was Framed in an Attempted Coup Against the President

Carter Page

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684511211
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The chickens are coming home to roost for the corrupt officials, mainstream media, and Democratic operatives who ruined the life of an innocent American in an attempt to subvert our democracy.Carter Page, the man at the center of one of the worst scandals in our country's history, reveals how our nation's top law enforcement officials abused their power and framed an innocent American citizen in their effort to take down Donald Trump. Page's gripping account, which shows that the rot goes deeper than anyone realized, names the men and women who tried to pull off a coup and didn't care who got hurt.

CHAPTER ONE THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

—John 8:32, engraved on the wall of CIA headquarters¹

At the time, August 5, 2016, seemed like a routine Saturday. I was visiting Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the Trump foreign policy advisory team, as our limited work together had become a bit more frequent in the summer leading up to the election. I was staying for five nights at the Grand Hyatt Washington, located just a few blocks up Tenth Street from FBI headquarters. Overall, things were going well that summer, and I was happy to spend more time with our Trump campaign volunteer team. But despite getting to know some of the best international relations and national security professionals I had ever worked with over the course of my long career, there was mounting evidence that the good times would not last. Things were starting to go off the rails.

That morning’s Washington Post included a long story about how my presence on the advisory team had somehow “[stirred] unease in both parties.”² Apparently, Democrats and Republicans alike took issue with my volunteer role. I didn’t take the criticism seriously. As the big media companies became more detached from reality and the truth, I still considered most of these leading pundits and other reporters to be a complete joke. It was no secret that members of “both parties” opposed then-candidate Trump’s presidential bid, and amidst these minor early salvos which quoted many of candidate Trump’s critics, I started to understand the media’s underhanded tactics firsthand.

That morning’s article for the Post could have been worse, I thought. Tom Hamburger and Steven Mufson, who wrote the hit piece, were among the very first operatives to ask me about the Democrat-funded opposition research that would dominate the headlines for years to come. They had contacted me to discuss alleged clues surrounding bribes that I supposedly might have been offered by top Russian officials. The phrasing alone showed how baseless the accusations were. Their outrageous questions came not long after high-priced political operatives had misled the Wall Street Journal enough to inquire about these very same partisan lies. None of these larger news organizations could be convinced to print them. At least not yet. While I knew the article could have been worse, I couldn’t possibly have imagined how nefarious the campaign would end up being.

I had invited Professor Stefan Halper as my guest to the Trump team party happening that evening. Years later the world would learn that that summer, Professor Halper had been working as a U.S. Intelligence Community source who spied on myself and other members of the Trump campaign.³ Luckily, he declined my invitation. After a long workout at the hotel gym, I headed over to the evening event.

When I arrived at the Trump foreign policy house party, two retired U.S. Army generals from our team greeted me at the door. Although many members of our group had been libeled by the press earlier that year after being identified as Trump campaign supporters, the focus of these latest attacks started to take an unexpected turn. A new Cold War had begun to heat up, and we joked that night about how my Russia connections might have made me a more natural target for these baseless political attacks. But as time started to run out on the final months of the Obama administration, none of us could have realized the dramatic scheme that was already being planned at the highest levels of government. Nor could we fathom the extraordinary dishonesty of the Intelligence Community, the media, and the Democratic Party that allowed the scandal to continue.

Aside from the Trump campaign volunteer meeting, my August 2016 visit to Washington offered me opportunities to catch up with several other foreign policy experts with whom I had recently spent time at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. One day I had lunch with James Carafano, the Heritage Foundation’s director of foreign policy studies. I also met with Iceland’s ambassador Geir Haarde and the Hungarian ambassador Réka Szemerkényi. My relatively ordinary meetings were inconsequential in comparison to another series of high-level briefings occurring in Washington that month. Just a few weeks later, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other members of Congress received an infamous series of briefings from CIA Director John Brennan “that intelligence officials had evidence of Russia’s intentions to help Mr. Trump.”⁴

Enabling these fabricated spy stories later earned Brennan an opportune career transition. After leaving government, he eventually became a national security and intelligence commentator on NBC and MSNBC.⁵ Previously unimaginable for former senior intelligence officials, his new role as an emerging media pundit was defined largely by a range of spirited attacks on President Trump.⁶ In 2018, as countless fictitious stories about the Mueller investigation continued to clap like thunder on television each night, Brennan even called the president’s actions “nothing short of treasonous.”⁷

When Brennan was head of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Obama, he avoided speaking like that—at least in public. The CIA’s standard operating procedures forbid agency officials from conducting domestic spy operations. Certainly one of the top spies in the nation’s attacking a major party’s nominee for president would violate every norm.

But norms did not dissuade Brennan from taking proactive steps against Donald Trump from the shadows during campaign season. His hatred for Trump would eventually grow into one of the defining traits of his career. When meeting with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in late August 2016, Brennan allegedly “indicated that unnamed advisors to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election.” Brennan went on to suggest financial dealings between Russian affiliates and advisors to Mr. Trump might be behind the conspiracy.⁸

A few days after meeting with Brennan, Senator Reid fired off a letter to FBI Director James Comey: “questions have been raised about whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee.”⁹

This supposedly conflicted individual was part of a Trump campaign with “significant and disturbing ties to Russia and the Kremlin.”¹⁰

That individual was me. Or more accurately, a fictional representation of me.

Based in part on his briefing from Brennan and other political operatives in the Intelligence Community, practically every statement Senator Reid made about me was untrue. As Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal correctly wrote years later, “The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan–Clinton collusion narrative into the open.”¹¹ It also marked the moment that Donald Trump and supporters of his campaign like myself would be plunged even deeper into a shadowy world of spies and intrigue. Later, our predicament would worsen with countless physical and judicial threats. Like an ever-strengthening drumbeat, the initial attacks that labeled us “traitors” were among the smears we heard coming from over the horizon. There would be much more to come.

It took tireless reporting, legal battles, and political dogfights to unearth a string of revelations about once “Top Secret” official acts. Thanks to those efforts, the wrongdoing of the most powerful men and women in our nation’s capital would begin to be exposed. The depth and coordination of their scheme was incredible, even to the people it targeted. What happened to me could happen to any American. That’s why I’m telling my story. The continuing cascade of revelations about this wrongdoing makes it clear that every American remains at risk, including and especially President Donald J. Trump.

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I had long known that America’s establishment politicians and their elite advisors were out of touch with the rapidly evolving world. Donald Trump was the first prominent national figure to stand up and say what many of us had seen with our own eyes. Most of America’s foreign policy mistakes during the post–Cold War era had been led by supposedly first-rate people whose decisions were often exempt from rigorous scrutiny. Candidate Trump recognized the mistakes repeated by Washington’s foreign policy mandarins and called for accountability.

As a longtime student of foreign policy, I found Trump’s call for change refreshing and long overdue. While establishment politicians pushed ideological policies that only served the interests of Washington insiders, Donald Trump soberly assessed America’s place on the world stage and put the interests of the American people first.

I was also pleased to hear candidate Trump call for a new relationship with Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could actually get along with Russia, wouldn’t that be a decent thing?” he asked.¹² I agreed. I thought it was in America’s interest to engage with Russia as an international partner where there was common ground, perhaps in taking steps to address the China threat.

My experience with Russia largely stemmed from my work in the energy sector. I had spent time with some of the industry’s greats like oil and gas investor T. Boone Pickens, and George P. Mitchell, the Texas oilman whose modest investment in hydraulic fracking technology had helped unlock trillions of dollars’ worth of domestic oil and gas reserves and catapulted the United States to the forefront of world energy production.

I also maintained connections in Russia, where Gazprom, the largest publicly listed natural gas company in the world held 17 percent of global gas reserves. Gazprom alone was much larger than ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Total, BP, and several other supermajors combined.

Opportunity to get involved with this strategic sector drew me to Moscow as an international energy financier. Living among the Russian people for a few years convinced me that the United States and Russia could forge a better relationship—that both our countries would benefit if we cooled down the level of hostility.

At the same time, I didn’t—as they say in the State Department—go native. I recognized that our countries had different histories, different political systems, and different interests. As I had done throughout my career, I put America’s interests first.

Patriotic service is fundamental to who I am. When I was in Moscow, the only government that “recruited” me as “an asset” was the United States government. I was a longtime source for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other American spy units, providing information on evolving energy markets and Russia’s ever-shifting business and political cliques. As I’ll explain later in this book, my service to the CIA extended far beyond Russia.

As a private figure in academic and U.S. government and business circles, I found a lot of hard evidence that Russia was less of an enemy than many foreign policy pundits often made it out to be. After decades of debate with international relations scholars, diplomats, intelligence officers, and other government officials, I knew my views would never be popular among foreign policy elites. In 2010, the Washington Post reported that the Intelligence Community included 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances.¹³ That gigantic intelligence bureaucracy largely relied on Cold War thinking to justify its existence. It represented a steady part of the foundation upon which the CIA and other agencies were constructed since the struggle with Moscow began after World War II.¹⁴

I knew my views went against the grain of the “interagency consensus.” But I felt foreign policy, like any other political issue, deserves a debate, and I was open in my desire to present another side of the argument. I never realized, however, that the foreign policy establishment would be so vengeful in punishing dissenters.

In 1998, after my service in the U.S. Navy during the Clinton administration, I became an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an institution sometimes viewed as synonymous with the foreign policy establishment. Throughout most of the Obama administration, I served as a fellow with the Center for National Policy in Washington. Originally finding some level of peaceful discourse with these people, I mistakenly assumed license to debate issues freely in public. Wow, was I wrong.

A few days before Donald Trump announced my name to the Washington Post, I received a message from the Center for National Policy saying that Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wanted to ask about my volunteering for the Trump campaign. I never spoke with Ms. Dowd. On March 23, 2016, less than forty-eight hours after the Washington Post announced that I was among the campaign’s volunteers, I received another email from the Center for National Policy. There was, you see, a very timely “streamlining and consolidation” taking place.¹⁵ My fellowship was officially over.

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As the world now knows, things like losing a fellowship were the least of the headaches that I, as an unpretentious supporter of candidate Trump, would begin to experience. At the behest of the Democratic Party and the Intelligence Community, the media established the narrative that I was a rogue actor operating in conspiracy with a foreign power, sent to conduct criminal acts. I sometimes wonder if the ranks of the political class and their media acolytes are filled with frustrated novelists. Of course, and as would eventually be proven after years of investigations, the reality was that they needed this narrative to make me a convenient portal through which to surveil the Trump campaign.

Throughout the ordeal of the next few years, I never tried to disguise who I really was. Although almost entirely unknown to much of the outside world, I had regularly participated in foreign policy debates for years. Though I was never integral to the Trump campaign, I viewed volunteering in 2016 as a way to remain engaged in this kind of intellectual dialogue. I was nothing more than an unpaid member of a volunteer team, and I never pretended to be anything else. As if my peripheral role on the campaign couldn’t be clearer, I had to miss our advisory committee’s only meeting with candidate Trump because of a previously scheduled engagement on the other side of the country.

In a previous era, when Richard Nixon’s administration was using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and even the CIA to spy on domestic opponents, journalists built their careers on exposing illicit domestic surveillance. Average Americans of all political stripes took risks to stand up for the U.S. Cons...