FBI believed Trump campaign aide Carter Page was recruited by Russians

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FBI believed Trump campaign aide Carter Page was recruited by Russians
  • By MATTHEW MOSK
  • MIKE LEVINE
Jul 22, 2018, 6:41 AM ET
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Mark Wilson/Getty Images, FILE
WATCHTrump officials who have left the White House


New documents show that one month before the 2016 elections, the FBI sought permission to surveil Carter Page, the one-time foreign policy adviser to the campaign of Donald Trump, because they alleged he had been recruited by the Russian government.

“The FBI believes the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Trump’s] campaign,” the application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said.



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Mark Wilson/Getty Images, FILE
Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, Nov. 2, 201,7 in Washington, DC.more +


Page is alleged in the documents to have had “established relationships with Russian Government officials, including Russian intelligence officers.”



(MORE: Carter Page: FBI 'shredded' Constitution by eavesdropping on me)


In more than 400 pages made public Saturday as a result of a Freedom of Information request by media outlets, and first reported by the New York Times, the government laid out its case for secretly monitoring Page in a series of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- or FISA – warrants, each of which was approved by the FISA court. The documents, which include an application and a warrant for surveillance of Page, were first filed in secret in October 2016, are blacked out in the version that was made public. He stepped away from the campaign a month earlier.

The public portions of the documents do not indicate the methods the FBI intended to use to monitor Page.



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Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images, FILE
President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House, July 18, 2018, in Washington, DC.


Trump tweeted about the release of the documents early Sunday morning from Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is spending the weekend. He said the release showed "little doubt" the DOJ and FBI "misled the courts."




Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump


Congratulations to @JudicialWatch and @TomFitton on being successful in getting the Carter Page FISA documents. As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of “Justice” and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!

5:28 AM - Jul 22, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy




Page told ABC News Saturday he was stunned by the allegations, which he has repeatedly maintained are false.

“I’m having trouble finding any small bit of this document that rises above complete ignorance and/or insanity,” he said in a text message response to questions about the surveillance request.



(MORE: Trump campaign adviser Carter Page targeted for recruitment by Russian spies)


The documents show the warrant applications were submitted and approved at least through June 2017, with the June 2017 application signed by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The release of the document comes in the wake of a lengthy partisan disagreement in congress over allegations that the FBI abused its powers when seeking to secretly monitor someone who was once associated with the Trump campaign -- though the campaign later distanced itself from Page.

Republicans who saw the full classified documents have previously alleged that surveillance of Page was improperly based on information gathered by Christopher Steele, a former British agent who gathered intelligence on alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russians. But the highly redacted documents released Saturday indicate that Steele’s information was just one of many reasons the FBI was concerned about Page.



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Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images, FILE
Rep. Devin Nunes talks during the House Intelligence Committee hearing on "Chinas Threat to American Government and Private Sector Research and Innovation Leadership," July 19, 2018.more +


Steele was working for a research company that, while initially hired by Trump’s Republican political opponents, was later funded by a Democratic Party law firm.

Rep. Adam Schiff, Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said he believes the documents “affirm that our nation faced a profound counterintelligence threat prior to the 2016 election.”

“Even in redacted form,” Schiff said, “the initial FISA application and three renewals underscore the legitimate concern FBI had about Page’s activities as it was investigating Russia’s interference; DOJ’s transparency with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about a specific source; and that DOJ followed proper procedures in receiving approval from four different judges.”



(MORE: After months of public denials, Carter Page admits he told Trump officials about meeting with Russians)


In recent months, Republicans have insisted the FBI did not adequately disclose the political motivations behind the research. But in the documents released Saturday, the FBI said it “speculates” that those behind the research were “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate 1’s campaign.”
 
Mueller come on man

The ic gotta be sooooo tired of these niggas shitting on them around the clock

They probably taking their time so they can nail every ass they can to the fucking wall

I hope so anyway
 
Mueller come on man

The ic gotta be sooooo tired of these niggas shitting on them around the clock

They probably taking their time so they can nail every ass they can to the fucking wall

I hope so anyway
There is no escape for Trump, except, possibly, if the GOP retains the House and Senate
this Fall. The walls are closing in from every direction. The checkmate begun when the
FBI made their most brazen power move and raided Michael Cohen. Trump then
compounded his own resultant dilemma by not bringing Cohen into the fold, or not
paying his bills. Since then, the rift between the two has only grown wider. Just
yesterday, Trump quite rightly questioned how a lawyer could surreptitiously
tape his own client, and even more ominously suggested that the act may have been
a crime. If Trump is now suggesting that the man who knows where the bones are
buried, and was his enforcer for 12 years in all the shady activities he did, may be a
criminal, the relation of the two may be irreparably fractured; and to the extent that
Cohen is already caught in the FBI snare, the only person who has something left to
lose is Trump...

But you can see this in the conduct of Trump ever since the FBI raid of Cohen on
April 9. Since then, Trump has enacted some of the most extreme measures imaginable;
He has imposed tariffs on the world, imprisoned children in concentration camps,
etc, all in a desperate effort to excite his base for the polls, and to incite its potential
rebellion, when his fate is sealed by Mueller's report...
 
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Now if the English get hold of Assange, they will make him cough up the
name of Wikileaks' contact in the Trump campaign. It is very clear that the
English are fed up of Trump and want him gone. For all the time he has
been in office, the English have tried to modulate and manipulate his conduct
by well timed schemes. When Trump mentioned that he wanted to withdraw
the US military from Syria, there was a suspicious nerve gas attack in Syria,
that forced Trump to send a fake missile attack that killed no one and
was coordinated with the Russian military on the ground, as punishment
for the alleged crime. Then when Trump made overtures to the Kremlin,
2 Russian spies were mysteriously attacked by an alleged nerve agent
in England, forcing Trump to expel 60 Russians. Then again, when
Trump started saying nice things about Putin, the same nerve agent
apparently killed a woman in England about a month ago, though this
time Trump refused to be distracted from his agenda of Bromance with
Putin...

The English finally are pulling all the stops. Just yesterday, the government
owned British Bullshit Corporation (BBC) aired a story in Canada and
America, alleging that Trump had hosted cocaine sex parties at which
sex was had 14 and 15 year old girls. This is damaging stuff, usually
disseminated against your worst enemies. At the same time, the English
have finally pulled the lever to get Julian Assange in their custody. With
this, they will formally subject the bugger to the prospect of a lengthy
prison sentence. The hope is that the imbecile will attempt to mitigate
his sentence by singing, and the English will no doubt hope that the first
verse in that song is the identity of his collaborator in the Trump
presidential campaign of 2016, which they will then happily forward
to Mueller
 
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Trump quite rightly questioned how a lawyer could surreptitiously
tape his own client, and even more ominously suggested that the act may have been
a crime.

To this point, when they ran this story on NPR yesterday they closed with "..the recordings were made in NY, where only one party's consent is needed for a recording."
 
Politics
‘This is not the only tape’: Michael Avenatti says there are more secret recordings of Trump




Felicia SonmezJuly 22 at 4:04 PMEmail the author

Michael Avenatti has a warning for President Trump: More tapes are out there.

At a roundtable Sunday on ABC News, the lawyer for adult-film star Stormy Daniels said that the secret recording of Trump that was revealed two days ago is far from the only one made by Trump’s longtime attorney Michael Cohen.

“This is not the only tape,” Avenatti said. “I can tell you that for a fact. There’s multiple tapes.”

He added: “That, ultimately, is going to prove to be a big problem for the president. You know, that old adage, ‘You’ve lived by the sword, you die by the sword,’ is going to be true in this case, because the president knew that his attorney, Michael Cohen, had a predisposition toward taping conversations with people.”

On Friday, three people with knowledge of the conversation told The Washington Post that Cohen had secretly taped a discussion with Trump in September 2016 about whether to purchase the rights to Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal’s account of her alleged affair with Trump.

That conversation took place one month after AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, bought the rights to McDougal’s story for $150,000 and then shelved it.

Cohen is being investigated for potential bank and election-law crimes. The recording was among the records seized in an FBI raid of his office and residences in April, multiple people familiar with the probe said.

One of Trump’s attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said in a statement Friday that the September 2016 recording is “powerful exculpatory evidence.” Even so, Trump lashed out at Cohen in a tweet on Saturday, claiming that it was “totally unheard of & perhaps illegal” that his attorney would tape him, despite the fact that New York’s wiretapping law permits the recording of conversations so long as at least one party agrees.


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Avenatti is representing Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen in exchange for her silence about an alleged decade-old affair with Trump. Avenatti has a history of taunting the president with claims to have more information on Trump’s alleged indiscretions. In March, he tweeted an image of what appeared to be a DVD and said he was sending a “warning shot” to the president regarding his denials of an affair with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

During Sunday’s roundtable, retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, an informal Trump adviser, pressed Avenatti to reveal how he knew of the existence of additional tapes, arguing that the leak of such information could represent a potential violation of lawyer-client privilege.

“You’re not in a position where you have been given that information properly,” Dershowitz said in one heated exchange.

Avenatti declined to reveal any details, maintaining that the only way he would have acted improperly would have been if he received the tape from someone in law enforcement.

“All of the information that the FBI seized, that’s not under lock and key,” he said, adding: “I could have received it from Michael Cohen. I could have received it from one of Michael Cohen’s counsel. I could have received it from others.”

Avenatti also noted that he ran into Cohen on Monday at a restaurant in New York City and that the two had a “very fruitful” conversation.

“I think he is ready to tell the truth,” Avenatti said of Cohen. “And ultimately, I think he is going to cooperate with us as it relates for our search for the truth.”

In a statement, Cohen’s attorney, Brent Blakely, said that neither he nor his client had cooperated with or provided any information to Avenatti. He added that they did not have “any interest whatsoever in cooperating with Mr. Avenatti to the detriment of President Donald Trump.”

“Mr. Cohen’s legal matters will not be tried in the court of public opinion, but in a court of law,” Blakely said.

Carol D. Leonnig, Rosalind S. Helderman and Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.
 
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