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One month before the 2016 elections, the FBI asked for a FISA mandate to monitor Page, that House Republicans – led by chairman of the intelligence commission Devin Nunes – have repeatedly tried to qualify as a part of a politically-motivated spying operation aimed at innocent associates of the Trump campaign, justified by nothing more than the raw intelligence gathered by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. The warrant application must be fully declassified, Nunes told Fox News on Monday, so the public can "really understand how broad and invasive this investigation has been for many Americans and how unfair it has been".
But it seems more and more that Republicans in the House have chosen to die on a hill that moves beneath their feet. "Pay attention to what you want," Democrat Senator Mark Warner, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday. According to one assistant, he said that "it was simply impossible to review the documents" on the page and conclude that the FBI "had good reason" to investigate him. It's not just the Democratic senators who believe that: Republican Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate's Intelligence Committee, told CNN in July that he FISA the judges had "good reasons" for issuing the FBI's page monitoring mandate. "I do not think I've ever expressed that I thought the FISA the application was short, "Burr said at the time.
There was a reason why Trump and his allies were working so hard to distance themselves from Page towards the end of the elections and last year: it was reviewed to go to Russia in July 2016, at the height of elections, apparently just delivering a speech at the new Moscow Economic School. Steele, who alleges a plot between Trump and the Kremlin to win the 2016 elections, said that during his stay in Moscow he met Igor Sechin, an ally of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of the Russian oil company Rosneft. US sanctions in exchange for the brokerage of a 19% stake in the oil giant. Unreduced portions of the page FISA the requests, issued in July by the Ministry of Justice in response to a request for freedom of information law, stated that "the FBI believes that the efforts of the Russian government are coordinated with Page and perhaps Other people associated with the campaign established relations with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence agents.
Page, who lived in Moscow in the early 2000s as investment banker at Merrill Lynch, wrote articles from 2013 to 2014 from time to time congratulating Sechin on its "achievements" in US-Canada relations. Russian. Russia as "moralizing expressions of moral superiority". In numerous interviews and television appearances following the publication of the dossier in January 2017, Page vehemently and indignantly rejected the accusations, including meeting government officials in Moscow. before the House Intelligence Committee last October. There, his story has changed.
Pressed by Schiff on hours of in camera testimony, whose transcript was published a week later, Page revealed that he had met with members of the Russian presidential administration in Moscow, as well as a number of people. Andrey Baranov, Head of Investor Relations at Rosneft. Page said that he had "perhaps" spoken to Baranov before going to Moscow and acknowledged that Baranov "may have briefly mentioned" a potential sale of Rosneft during their conversation. When asked if he had raised the issue of sanctions, Page was equally evasive: "Not directly," he replied. And after denying the fact, he claimed to have "perhaps" greeted the professor abroad Joseph Mifsud, who told another Trump campaign collaborator, George Papadopoulos, that the Kremlin's record incriminated the emails from Hillary Clinton.
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