In his first interview since House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) anti-FBI memo was declassified and released last week, former President Trump campaign aide Carter Page told Fox News Monday that the document in question was “worse than I could’ve possibly imagined.”
“When I first saw it, it was, you know, there were a lot of details that keep dripping out. It sounded really bad,” he said during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Monday night. “When I actually saw it, it was even worse than I could’ve possibly imagined.”
Page became caught up in the initial throngs of the Russia investigation over his contacts with Russian officials while he was in Moscow during the summer of 2016, around the time he was working for the Trump campaign.
He’s reemerged as a focal point in recent weeks after the Republican-authored memo was released, purporting to reveal that FBI officials misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) when they obtained a warrant to expand surveillance of Page, whom they believed was working as a foreign agent at the time. Republicans claim the FBI used information from the Christopher Steele dossier to get the warrant and did not reveal that the research was funded, in part, by Democrats.
Page told Fox he was “particularly” surprised by the negative attacks against him since the contents of the memo were declassified.
“But what was particularly interesting is the next 48 hours after that, where part of the attack on Chairman Nunes and the committee was to come up with any new information to discredit me and anything related to the investigation or the overall investigation,” he said. “It’s pretty stark contrast between getting the facts our there and having— you know, still getting attacked. So it’s pretty crazy.”
Page has consistently maintained his innocence. When the memo was first released he praised House Intel Republicans for “discovering this unprecedented abuse of process.”
While Page only worked for the Trump campaign for six months, he has been a consistent figure of interest in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump campaign officials worked with the foreign power to aid that effort. Page’s July 2016 visit to Moscow, in which he gave a speech promoting better relations between the U.S. and Russia, according to The New York Times, became a focus of the FBI’s investigation.
