have a feeling Mueller is gonna get these guys on the Rosneft deal. Carter Page is a moron.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...t-have-discussed-russia-with-campaign-staffer
-In April, Papadopoulos went to London and discussed the hacked e-mails with the professor, a month before anyone else knew about them
-He tries to get the campaign to send someone there to deal with Putin. Manafort says that it will have to be someone low-level, not Trump.
In July, they send Carter Page to Moscow. He makes a deal with Putin: sanctions relief and a 19% stake in Rosneft for election help. Putin says he wants a personal confirmation from Trump that the deal is a go.
-On July 27, Trump looks into the camera and says, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 e-mails." That was the 'yes.'
-December: 19.5% of Rosneft vanishes in a sell-off to a group of anonymous shell corporations.
corrupt AF
Couple of things here:
First, Putin uses the state-owned conglomerates as patronage vehicles. One really common scheme is for Gazprom/Rosneft, et al sell a commodity to a middleman company controlled by the beneficiary of the patronage. The middlemen get super-cheap natural gas or oil, etc, then sell it at market prices and reap a profit, some of which gets kicked back up to the patron. There are other schemes, and they're all similarly corrupt and mafia-esque. Selling a direct chunk of the company looks a little different to me. Supposedly it was sold to provide liquidity to Russia's spluttering economy in advance of the 2018 elections.
If there were any US-related kickback, it wouldn't be 19% of Rosneft. The allegation in the Steele Dossier is that Page and unknown individuals were offered essentially a brokerage fee
on the sale of 19% of Rosneft. The buyer ended up being various Qatari entities, and the byzantine structure of the deal is explained as measures to avoid western sanctions. Putin's ruling coterie is corrupt as hell. Trump's crowd is known for cupidity and shady dealing. The timeline is tantalizing. But there isn't any meat on those particular bones, IMO.
So, Carter Page. He's explicitly named in the dossier as some kind of go-between for a (allegedly failed) earlier iteration of the Rosneft deal. The most specific allegations against him outside of that are from Michael Isikoff, who has a solid track record on the Russia issue (he broke most of the stories about Michael Flynn's lobbying and financial entanglements). He attributes to an "American intelligence official" statements that Page met with Igor Sechin (the Rosneft chair) and various other Russian officials in a couple of separate trips to Moscow. The problem with that is that it's unclear if the source had direct knowledge of that or if it were based on unverified info from the dossier. IMO I think it's best to treat that allegation with some skepticism.
There was a profile on Page in (I think) The Atlantic a few months ago, which cast him as kind of a pathetic figure, a guy with big aspirations of being a player and no real connections or tangible results, who'd managed to kinda fail upward into his situation with the Trump campaign. I remember that someone quoted in the article just laughed when asked if a guy like him would get face time with Igor Sechin. On one hand, maybe there's a specific effort to discredit the guy (and on that score, he's done pretty well on his own) but on the other hand, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I think that the Trump crew's early and vehement distancing of themselves from Page probably means that he's compromised somewhere along the line (remember that he was extensively scrutinized by the FBI after he was abortively recruited as part of a Russian espionage ring broken up a few years ago), but I don't think it's likely that the Rosneft/Page stuff is legit. Now, I DO think that he's probably screwed himself at some point, since he's apparently done a lot of talking to investigators without legal representation but one way or the other, it seems like he's rather more a bait fish (in the context of Russia, Trump, OR the FBI) than a trophy.
So even though I'm skeptical of the splashy allegations about him, I still see a lot of sketchiness. Why did the Trump campaign let him in the door in the first place?
