A month after the election, Trump campaign energy consultant and foreign policy adviser Carter Page travels to Moscow for a second meeting with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and Rosneft investor relations chief Andrey Baranov between December 8 and December 12.
Page met with Dvorkovich and Baranov in July, among other Russian elites, but denied that he ever met with Russian officials for months until he testified before the House Intelligence Committee.
In a speech during his Moscow trip, Page boasts about the future of Russia-U.S. relations under America’s “new leadership” and his connections to Donald Trump.
I made a commitment not to talk about the internal work that I did at the campaign, but I’ve certainly been in a number of meetings with Trump, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him.
Carter Page
Page also meets with a Russian banker that he never names, but it could be Sergei Gorkov, the Putin-appointed CEO of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank. Jared Kushner meets with Gorkov the day after Page’s speech.
This may be a coincidence, but Page’s trip to Moscow comes one day after Russia announced that Swiss commodity trading firm Glencore and the Qatar Investment Authority are buying about 20 percent of Rosneft. Rosneft is Russia’s state oil company, which is currently under U.S. sanctions.
Some Backstory
Page lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2007, where he worked for a firm on deals for Gazprom, the energy giant in business with Putin friend and crime ring leader Semion Mogilevich. In 2008, Page founded a U.S. investment fund called Global Energy Capital with former Gazprom executive Sergei Yatsenko. In April 2013, he wrote a letter to an academic publisher boasting about his previous work as an adviser to the Kremlin. Sometime in 2014, the FBI received a warrant to monitor Page under suspicions that he was a victim of Russian intelligence targeting.
External Sources
The New York Times – Rosneft (Archived)
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
