Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, said the warrant FBI agents used to snoop on him is “so ridiculous” and “misleading” and that he never acted as a Russian agent.
“I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination,” Mr. Page told CNN’s State of the Union.
Mr. Page, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, was responding to the release of previously top-secret documents used by the FBI to obtain a wiretap and snoop on Mr. Page in 2016.
The FBI believe Mr. Page was the subject of a “targeted recruitment” by the Russian government, according to the papers released late Saturday.
Mr. Page said he sat in on meetings but never spoke to Russians cited in the documents, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin.
“Never in my life,” Mr. Page said.
Mr. Trump says the disclosed warrants shows the FBI used dodgy sources to spy on his campaign through Mr. Page, though Democrats and some Republicans say the FBI had good reason to track Mr. Page, who acknowledged being an informal adviser to the Kremlin and had traveled to Russia.
Mr. Page said he participated in a few meetings in the run-up to G20 meetings in 2013 but that he served an informal role and was not the foreign agent described in the papers.
“This is so ridiculous it’s just beyond words. You’re talking about misleading the courts …Where do you even begin? It’s literally just a complete joke,” Mr. Page said.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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