Carter Page, the Manhattan energy investor who briefly served as a foreign policy consultant to the Trump campaign, is disputing a report that he is refusing to testify or interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“I have offered to participate in the November first hearing,” Page told the Washington Examiner and added he has received no response back from the committee as of yet.
A story late Tuesday by Politico said, “[Page] will not be cooperating with any requests to appear before the panel for its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and would plead the Fifth, according to a source familiar with the matter.”
When asked if he has been asked by the committee to appear on any other date for which he declined, Page said, “I’ve had no specifics… It’s still an open question at this point,” and would not elaborate beyond that.
Social media companies Twitter and Facebook are slated for an open hearing on November 1, but Page made the case that his story would dovetail with a hearing on government-initiated propaganda.
“In the interest of equal time, getting the whole truth out there and knowing the full scope of what happened before the election, then I think it’s essential to understand the influence fake news might have had based on illicit efforts to mislead the U.S. electorate,” he said.
Page is currently representing himself in a defamation lawsuit against the parent company of Yahoo News, Oath Inc. Yahoo reported in September of last year that U.S. intelligence officials were looking into his ties with Russia. He believes the intelligence agencies began those inquiries in part because they were relying on the “Steele Dossier,” which was being assembled as opposition research against Trump as a candidate, but which Page refers to derisively as the “dodgy dossier.”
The report by Yahoo gave details of some specifics that investigators were looking into, and those specifics eventually matched elements of the dossier once it was published in full by Buzzfeed in January.
The issue of how the dossier landed in the hands of U.S. intelligence officers continues to be an item of concern for Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, who has recently queried the FBI again about when they first acquired the dossier, and if they believed they had received similar information from British intelligence services. Grassley is worried that Steele discussed his dossier with British sources, who then relayed some of that information to the FBI. At that point, it may have looked to the FBI as though they had established a corroborating source, but instead, it may have all been based on the one dossier.
The contents of the dossier have been hotly debated, but most of the claims haven’t been or can’t be verified, and on numerous occasions, Page has said that allegations in the dossier that claimed he met with certain Russian officials are not true.
An April report by CNN claimed that the FBI used the dossier as a partial basis in obtaining a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on him in 2016.
Page told the Washington Examiner that for the purposes of his interactions or negotiations with the Senate Intelligence Committee, he has not formally entered into an attorney-client relationship with anyone, although he has had what he calls “informal” discussions with advisors and friends of his who are attorneys.
Emails to the committee requesting comment were not returned.
