![]() “People really respect him in this industry. “He’s an extremely well-informed, authoritative expert on Russia,” says Mikhail Leontiev, a pro-Kremlin talking head and spokesman for Rosneft, Russia’s state oil giant. He is being treated in Russia as a person with potentially important ties in America. ![]() Since being named by Trump as an adviser, Page, who has spent his career trying to put together energy deals in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has finally begun to be noticed in the region. What I did find, however, is that while Page might not be helping Trump, Trump has been a significant help to Page. (“I can poll any number of people involved in energy in Russia about Carter Page and they’ll say, ‘Carter who? You mean Jimmy Carter?’” says one veteran Western investor in Russian energy.) Page also, as I would be surprised to discover, appears largely unknown to Trump’s own campaign. And since they increasingly were fleeing the candidate, who were the people who would line up to advise him instead? What would they be like?Įnter Carter Page, a 44-year-old Ph.D., and business school graduate who claims an expertise in Russia and energy, yet who, I quickly discovered, was known by Russia experts, nor energy experts, nor Russian energy experts. (In his defense, Trump said that “Hugh was giving me name after name, Arab name, Arab name, and there are few people anywhere, anywhere, that would have known those names.”) The Republican foreign policy specialists who would normally be a brain trust began slamming him in the press or publicly signing on to anti-Trump manifestos. In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump confused the Kurds with the Iranian Al-Quds Force, couldn’t tell the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas, and couldn’t recognize the name of the leader of ISIS. "We want top-of-the-line professionals.” As the primaries unfolded, it became increasingly obvious that Trump would need all the top-of-the-line help he could get when it came to foreign policy. “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people," Trump famously told a Post reporter last summer about how he would staff his campaign. This has been a concern swirling around the outsider candidate since he began, a real-estate developer with almost no serious Washington connections to tap for advice. The story resurfaced the name of a character who’d all but vanished from the campaign, and reawakened questions about who, exactly, Trump was surrounding himself with. intelligence for purported back-channel ties to Russian leaders. Someone, apparently, has heard of him: On Friday, Yahoo News reported that Page was being probed by U.S. ![]() “It's odd, because I've heard of every other financier who was a player on Moscow at the time.” He was one of the biggest Western players in the Russian market until President Vladimir Putin turned on him and Browder became his fierce critic. “Strangely, I've never heard of Carter Page until this Trump connection,” Bill Browder responded to me in an email. ![]() “But I am getting a lot of emails from friends asking, ‘Have you heard of this guy?’” “I had not heard of Carter Page before it came out in the media,” says another prominent Western businessman who has worked in the former Soviet Union for more than two decades. “What’s this guy’s name?” says one former Western energy CEO who spent years in Russia, and would have overlapped there with Page. And yet, despite the tightly knit nature of the expat business community in Russia, no one I spoke to had ever heard of Carter Page. This piqued my interest: I have been a Russia wonk for most of my adult life, I spent years living and reporting from Moscow, still go there regularly for reporting trips, and am in touch with lots of friends there. As for his connection to Trump, when Page was reached for comment by the New York Times the day after Trump’s big reveal, he said he had been sending policy memos to the campaign and the paper said he “will be advising Mr. Reporters quickly Googling found that Page is the founder and managing partner of an investment fund called Global Energy Capital, and that he claims to have years of experience investing in Russia and the energy sector.
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