Editors’ note: Below is the introduction former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page wrote to the edition of the Mueller report that Page is publishing. We present it with minimal copy edits and with no claims to its veracity. The author’s endnotes have been converted into hyperlinks.
One of the Most Infamous Books in History
Throughout history, even the most advanced societies have at times reached troublesome low points in their development. Such nadirs typically come when government operatives achieve authoritarian levels of power over their populace, including loyal citizens. These operatives and their government cronies have frequently created a cult of personality reflecting supreme levels of arrogance and virtually unchecked authority, feeding their need for personal self-aggrandizement by writing a propaganda book. The purpose of such books was often to present some outrageously fictional version of the current reality to their country’s populace. In Italy, Mussolini had his autobiography. In Libya, Qaddafi widely distributed his Green Book both to the masses, in the national media and even with featured quotes on billboards throughout the country. Iraq’s tyrannical Saddam Hussein wrote a series of novellas. The actions of operatives working in support of the Democratic Party reflected such age-old patterns during the 2016 Presidential Election, which eventually led to the creation of the Report that follows —a shameful conglomeration of propaganda meant to sow further discord in the minds of Americans against their fellow citizens.
Most of the prior historical propaganda endeavors are modest when compared to DOJ’s two-volume work which was created by a handful of despots in Washington. Miraculously, the fortitude of the American citizenry is strong. The people of this great nation have transcended the abuses unleashed by the Democrats during the last Presidential campaign and following the 2016 Election. Their propaganda attempts end with us as sane Americans seeking to regain stability in the wake of the damages this farce caused to our country and its people. The Russia hoax dominated news coverage both at home and abroad throughout recent years, as the media and Democrats worked to influence Americans. It has wrought damage to our country’s national security and foreign relations by parroting lies or conspiracy theories from a sham investigation that was never necessary in the first place. Following the standards set by other despots who preceded them in the annals of history, those involved in the Russiagate hoax have created and manipulated the one-sided propaganda found in these two thick Volumes that follow.
In June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for President with a determined commitment to Make America Great Again. That promise resonated with Americans. Against the best efforts of the party that was in power at the time, he won in November 2016. Unsuccessfully, the architects of the two main sections of this book went to extraordinary lengths to derail his agenda to help our country prosper and tried desperately to achieve precisely the opposite objective. They tried to reengineer the will of the people against President Trump by outrageously portraying him and supporters of his campaign such as myself as “Russian agents”. When that effort failed and he won the presidency in an electoral college landslide, sore losers tried to disrupt his presidential transition, then his presidency by concocting an elaborate hoax based on a dossier funded by the DNC and fabricated by former Russian intelligence operatives. Their attempt further escalated with the appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, just a few months into President Trump’s first term. Mr. Mueller in turn brought on board a group of legal operatives with varying degrees of financial ties to the Democratic party, mostly as donors. Meanwhile, their cronies simultaneously continued attacks on the Administration and innocent Americans. While President Trump has spent much of his first term working to empower honest Americans by freeing them from the burdens of government overreach and bringing economic security to our country, the bureaucratic vultures from the opposing party swooped down to devour anyone who dared question their authority and supported the president. Even though President Trump was the main target of their crimes against the republic, many innocent Americans found themselves caught up in this growing storm.
Beyond the obstacles that this team of partisan Democrat donors have created for President Trump, other associated political operatives in the left-leaning media and members of Congress produced rabid offshoots of this diatribe. In turn, they caused untold damages to innocent Americans, the presidency, and our nation’s security. The full extent of the damage their lies had on American society still remains immeasurable. The havoc that they wrought upon the lives of many Trump supporters marked just the tip of the iceberg of the assault on our Constitution. For those who might have remained optimistic and doubted the true intent of these Democrat operatives at first, their end goal became increasingly clear from the very outset of the perverted endeavor created by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 17, 2017. As the truth would eventually become uncovered, their goal seemed largely focused on damaging President Donald J. Trump.
Although the murky financial arrangements leading to the probe against President Trump and his supporters remains unconfirmed, by some estimates the astronomical price tag for this harassment ran “between $31 million and $35 million.” Largely funded by the American taxpayers whose electoral voice these partisan operatives sought to overturn, the large sums of allocated money in turn facilitated lifestyles of the rich and shameless for the partisan Democrats who would join this political assault squad. Such routines included hobnobbing with NBA stars at taxpayer-funded luxury hotels, on evenings when they were too lazy to drive home at night.
The exorbitant costs for American society and the U.S. economy extend far beyond these millions of dollars in baseline government expenditures. Carrying far more serious strategic ramifications, a virtually unchecked ability to damage one’s political enemies carried with it much greater historic significance. This encompassed not only destroying the reputations of innocent people and siphoning off significant portions of the personal resources of their targets. In many instances, the assault went much deeper and risked their lives, safety and security too. As was the case for myself, it often became a matter of life and death.
As a primary example of how this chaos came about and consistent with many of the stories found throughout these Volumes, the Democrat party’s lies echoed false claims by alleged Russian intelligence sources. They used those same Russian intelligence sources to base their hit-squad’s farcical assumptions from the very start of the investigation. The quintessential example of this may be found in the 2016 Dodgy Dossier, which was funded at great expense by the DNC and their sponsored candidate. That was assembled as “opposition research”, concocted by a gang of highly unethical consultants. At this juncture, their conflicts of interest are too extensive to even begin to outline in this short introduction. But as further clarity continues to come into focus and apparently stretches back to the very genesis of the Witch Hunt in 2016 or perhaps beyond, a growing body of evidence now indicates that their falsely-described “sources” stemmed directly from an illicit spout of Russian-sourced lies. Thus, the Democrats were carrying out the very Russian collusion for which they sought to frame me and my colleagues.
The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that, “The right of peaceable assembly is a right cognate to those of free speech and free press and is equally fundamental.” To the contrary, key elements of this two volume report help to display the Democratic Party’s great disdain for Americans who dared to exercise such rights of peaceable assembly as supporters of President Trump, damaging America’s sacred democratic process and became targets for our political views. One of the most infamous examples can be found in the section of Volume I, which characteristically and disparagingly casts a shadow over a person who I had the great privilege to come to know in 2016: “Chief policy advisor Sam Clovis expressed appreciation for Page’s work and praised his work to other Campaign officials.” Contrary to the countless associated false portrayals by Democrat operatives which would wreak havoc on his life over the months and years that followed, Dr. Clovis is in fact an American hero. A retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, a professor, an entrepreneur and a dedicated public servant. As an early supporter of candidate Trump in 2015, he stands among the very best of the many distinguished U.S. military veterans who offered their support to this historic campaign. Yet his integrity, kindness and countless successes throughout an illustrious career only emboldened the Democrat operatives in DOJ and other parts of Washington who viciously attacked him with lies from almost the initial moment he stepped on the national stage.
Volume I Survival: The Democrats’ Witch Hunt, Special Warfare and Anti-Terror Combat
As a Trident Scholar and Political Science Honors Major at the United States Naval Academy, I never could have imagined the reasons why my most relevant training would eventually come many years later. Towards the end of my service in the military, I would ultimately attend an anti-terrorism training program at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in early 1998 as I prepared to deploy overseas for a United Nations military observer mission in Africa. Given the partisan Witch Hunt by Democrat sponsors that eventually helped to foment the hundreds of pages that follow in this book, it would prove to be the most essential training in my life.
The media hysteria and false claims paid for by the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) which they pushed into the hands of journalists served a few primary purposes. First, it cast a shadow over the U.S. Department of Justice, leading to the shady Witch Hunt that caused enormous damage to our country and her citizens. Second, it led to many risks to the lives of Trump supporters like me, closely resembling the legal definition of terrorism: “acts dangerous to human life”.
A tribute to the either complete lack of truth or the deceptively incomplete narrative found throughout much of the following work of propaganda, these partisan investigators quote on multiple occasions herein the infamous September 23, 2016 defamatory news report that first unleashed many waves of incessant risks on my life. The death threats I received echoed the initial libelous reports and came on countless instances. Absurdly, the false premises of these libelous media reports would repeatedly become an important basis for the fraud on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court down in the Swamp of Washington. Beginning with the false reports from the DNC during the final months before American voters went to the polls 2016, these incessant media assaults and the fraudulent Washington investigations that stemmed from their collusion with the media would mark a primary foundation upon which the Democrats would continue to attack President Trump and his supporters over the years that followed. The disinformation that resulted represents an essential prelude to the protection that they insisted on providing to James Comey, the person who on many levels helped to exacerbate these risks to my personal safety. I often informed his agents of these security threats from Oklahoma during a series of meetings in March 2017. Rather than effectively address them that month, they only continued into April as further government news leaks were revealed.
Prelude to Volume II: My Interaction with FBI Director James Comey
Beyond the retaliatory political techniques reflected throughout these Volumes, the end objective remained clear throughout. While Volume I of this report focused on Russian collusion, it would increasingly become apparent that the real collusion with sources in Moscow was actually carried out by the Democrats themselves. Similarly, the backward nature of the report continues through Volume II as well, which is focused on “Obstruction-of-justice”. Much of this almost equally voluminous second compendium of ill-conceived conspiracy theories focused on protecting James Comey – the public official who signed three of my four illegitimate FISA warrant applications. Just like almost everything else since the start of the Witch Hunt, the irony of this section seems to increasingly flip this narrative on its head over time as the truth continues to come out and associated investigations have persisted.
Soon after the initial libelous Yahoo News report against me one Friday which quickly catapulted me from an unknown private figure to a prominent target of the media in the wake of their defamatory story throughout much of the weekend, I sent Mr. Comey a letter via email late on Sunday night, September 25, 2016. As I correctly indicated at the time, the false information that was widely distributed by the Democrats represented the genesis of a real Witch Hunt. Rather than heed notice to my correct information or contact me directly as I had requested, he instead cited these very same defamatory reports in the fraudulent FISA warrant application that he signed the next month. This all happened just a few weeks before the historic 2016 election. But rather than finally setting the record straight in the Volumes that follow, many members of the Mueller team themselves were among the donors who would fund the same organizations that commissioned the Dodgy Dossier upon which these outrageous reports were based. While significant reference is included throughout the volumes to the alleged conflicts of interest which eventually convinced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself for some reason, the conflicts of the Democrat funders who wrote much of this report run far deeper.
The legal definition of obstruction of justice is defined in 18 U.S. Code § 1503. By many accounts, this has increasingly been found to precisely reflect what was allegedly done to invade the privacy of myself and other members of the Trump movement at the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington between October 2016 and June 2017. It all came about as a series of misleading warrant applications [that] were submitted by government operatives. Given the role that Mr. Comey played in advancing and endorsing three of these four warrant applications, it now seems only fair and just that similar investigations should be conducted to get to the bottom of what went wrong. Under the leadership of the new U.S. Attorney General William Barr and in the wake of growing dismay surrounding the genesis of the report which follows herein, indications have increasingly been made that these many open questions will now finally be addressed in the coming months.
My Day in the Dungeon
Among some commentators, the Guantanamo Bay (“GTMO”) detention camp has at times come under criticism for their treatment of detainees. By comparison, the strong-arm tactics used by the partisan interrogators to squeeze information from their political opponents was far more invasive and obscene on all levels. In comparison, a government-funded vacation down at GTMO in the Caribbean might have seemed almost luxurious and relaxing.
The personal, vindictive and irrelevant attacks found throughout each of these Volumes of the report that follow reflect the similarly disrespectful tone that the partisan Washington officials echoed during most of my experiences with them. My interactions with those Democrat sponsors came to a culmination when they eventually confronted me face-to-face in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on Friday, November 17, 2017. Just as the one-sided reputational assault marked deep levels of prejudice, most of the details I explained to the Witch Hunt team that day which provided the most relevant color on the full story were all but entirely disregarded in the final written end product which has now been released to the American public. Until that full truth is allowed to come out, the havoc wreaked on many of the fundamental principles of justice that has defined America since its founding in the eighteenth century remains imperiled. Based on my personal experience near the eye of this storm, any possible attempt to apply these one-sided portrayals to a careful analysis of the law makes such an endeavor entirely immature. The time has now come to rectify these serious wrongs.
Restoring Integrity in the U.S. Justice System and Intelligence Community
A well-educated observer of history can greatly benefit from understanding the misdeeds of past scoundrels who have done immense damage to society. This comprehension can prove essential to ensuring that such mistakes are never made again. For this reason, the infamous Volumes that you are about to read mark a necessary task for any responsible citizen who is prepared to critically examine the many false assumptions that have confused America and the world throughout much of the past few years. Recovery can only begin with a careful and watchful eye, as well as a discerning viewpoint. The pages that make up the notorious work which follows reflect widescale mismanagement and dishonesty among some within the U.S. Department of Justice. This has also encompassed sister agencies of the Intelligence Community that contributed to this sham, particularly elements of the FBI. If the full facts are eventually taken into account as did not occur in the Volumes below, the time may soon come to rectify the wrongs that have left the integrity of once storied American institutions such as the mainstream media and Department of Justice in question.
Carter Page was a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
