Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page said Monday he never suspected he was being plied for information on the campaign following reports an FBI informant sought meetings with him in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.
“I never felt groomed. If he’s good at doing that, then perhaps that’s part of the game,” Page said during an interview on Fox News.
Page’s comments follow President Trump demanding Sunday the Justice Department investigate whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign for political purposes, accusing the bureau of embedding a “spy” in his team.
[Trump: FBI embedding spy in 2016 campaign would be ‘all time biggest political scandal’ if true]
Several news outlets named the FBI source as Stefan Halper, an American who recently worked at Cambridge University, while others used identifying information but withheld his name.
Halper reportedly spoke with three Trump campaign officials, including Page, campaign co-chair Sam Clovis, and fellow campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
Page told Fox News he couldn’t recall who approached who first when the pair met at a multiday conference in July 2016, nor could he remember how the topic of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was broached when they kept in touch following the event.
“I think Russia was in the news, and I think a lot of politics sort of revolves around various news events, and so these various stories came up,” he said.
“Maybe this individual who we’re talking about might have been a little bit nicer than I might otherwise have expected. Although we were talking about all of the abuses that were happening with this dodgy dossier, which was first debuted in September 2016, as a way of damaging the Trump campaign and basically destroying myself and so he always seemed very sympathetic about that,” Page added, referring to the Trump dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
Page was previously surveilled by the FBI after DOJ and the bureau were granted a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, in part because of Steele’s dossier.
