A little background on Carter Page, "idiot" and "kook"

After Trump’s disorganized and not particularly professional campaign managed to win most of the first GOP primaries, he faced increasing pressure to demonstrate that he was a plausible major-party presidential nominee. His aides decided that part of that task entailed putting together something they could call a “foreign policy team.” The task fell to Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host and evangelical activist from Iowa who had distinguished himself by joining the Trump campaign relatively early.

Carter Page didn’t wait for Clovis to find him. According to his later testimony, Page reached out to New York’s Republican Party chair, Ed Cox, in late December 2015, asking to be put in touch with Trump’s team. Cox put Page in contact with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who sent him over to Clovis, who is said to have put him on Trump’s list of advisers.

[...]

Papadopoulos was added to the same team as Page, and according to a plea agreement he signed last year, Clovis told him early on “that a principal foreign policy focus of the [Trump] campaign was an improved US relationship with Russia.” With that in mind, Page would seem a perfect fit, considering his job history and policy views.

  Vox

I keep forgetting about Sam Clovis, who's going to need a XXXXL size orange jumpsuit.

Emails and documents made public in connection with Page’s congressional testimony do show that he was in regular contact with several campaign foreign policy advisers in the spring and summer of 2016 — though it’s not entirely clear what, exactly, he was doing.

On May 16, 2016, Page sent a curious email to two of his fellow foreign policy advisers, J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. Page wrote (emphasis added):

As discussed, my strategy in order to keep in sync with the media relations guidelines of the campaign has been to make my key messages as low-key and apolitical as possible. But after seeing the principal’s tweet a few hours in response to the cocky “in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue” quote by the same speaker at Rutgers yesterday, I got another idea. If he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him.

“The principal” here is Trump, and “this honor” Page wants Trump to “take my place” in, he admitted in congressional testimony, is ... a trip to Russia.

[...]

Trump didn’t end up going to Russia that year — but Page did, for a five-day trip in July 2016. [...] Yet Page and Trump’s team said, then and afterward, that Page took this trip purely as a private citizen and not at all on behalf of the campaign.

[...]

Finally, in September, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported that the government was investigating Page’s ties to the Kremlin — a revelation that led the Trump campaign to harshly disassociate themselves from Page. (In Page’s own telling, he chose to take a leave of absence.)

[...]

Rumors of the latter soon reached the ears of Christopher Steele, the former British spy researching Trump’s Russia ties. On July 19, 2016, Steele filed a report for what become known as his “dossier” focused on Page’s Russia trip. Citing Russian sources, he wrote:

That Page had met with Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft, the majority Russian government-owned oil company, and discussed lifting US sanctions
That Page had also met with Igor Diveykin, a Russian intelligence official, and discussed Russian “kompromat” on Clinton (and Trump)

In a later report, dated October 18, 2016, Steele made an even more astonishing claim:

That when Page allegedly met with Sechin, the oil executive had offered Page and Trump’s associates “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return” for lifting sanctions, and that Page “expressed interest” and confirmed that Trump would lift sanctions if he won

But in the year and a half since, no one has yet managed to confirm any of the claims in Steele’s dossier about Page’s trip.

[...]

Page, meanwhile, has furiously denied the claims, saying that he’s never met either Sechin or Diveykin and disparaging what he calls the “dodgy dossier” both in media appearances and under oath.

As you would.

George Papadopoulos was also emailing campaign advisers about a potential Trump trip to Russia around the same time. And according to his plea deal, one senior official forwarded his email to another and wrote, “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

Not knowing what Papadopoulos has said since being "flipped" by Mueller, I'd think the Trump cabal must be desperately nervous. It's obvious they're desperately trying to discredit and muddy the investigation.

Page also wrote an email to two Trump aides saying he’d received “some incredible insights and outreach [...] from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential administration here.”

Also, Page admitted that he did meet with a different Rosneft executive — Andrey Baranov, the company’s head of investor relations, with whom he had a preexisting relationship. When asked about some of this under oath, Page sounded evasive. He claimed his interaction with Dvorkovich lasted “well less than 10 seconds,” and that his reference to “insights and outreach” referred merely to speeches he’d attended and articles he’d read during his trip.

[...]

The [FBI] was looking into a suspected Russian spy ring and learned that one of their suspects, Victor Podobnyy, had met with Page in hopes of finding a potential recruit.

They listened to a tape on which Podobnyy said he thought Page was an idiot, and...

... I will feed him empty promises. ... You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.

Page did end up giving some energy business documents to Podobnyy, and the FBI interviewed him about it in June 2013. But they decided Page didn’t know Podobnyy was a spy, and didn’t charge him with anything.

In other words, the FBI thought Page was an idiot, too. And, I suppose it's possible Page did know Podobnyy was a spy. At any rate, the FBI told him at that time that he was being looked at by the Russians as a possible asset. And Page, the idiot, continued to go about dealing with the Russians, and the Trump campaign.

Christopher Steele was meanwhile doing his own investigation at the time — and was providing what he found to his own contacts in the FBI (who had worked with him before and viewed him as a reliable source of information).

[...]

But it was on October 21, 2016, that the Justice Department took the particularly dramatic step of asking for permission to surveil Page’s communications. (Note that this was a month after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Page and said he had nothing to do with it, which would seem to debunk the talking point that this was an excuse for the FBI to spy on the Trump team.)

The following is taken from an article written by J.J. Patrick on November 5, 2017:

That's his Twitter profile.  I don't know about his investigative credentials, but Byline, where the article is written has a profile on him that says he was

 "a police officer for ten years, resigning from New Scotland Yard having acted as a whistle-blower, kicking off a parliamentary inquiry into the manipulation of crime figures by the police. He received open praise at the highest levels, for his integrity.

James now freelances as an independent journalist, blogs, and has created a body of work which includes regular contributions to The Justice Gap and The Common Space."

So, on with the article...

Sometimes, you just have to kick the rocks over and wait for the world to catch up.

[...]

One of the central issues in the investigation into Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia relates to Carter Page – a man whose CV largely consisted of doing financial business with Russia until Trump. Page was somewhat mysteriously hired by the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor, despite holding no qualifications for such a role. During the election, it became public knowledge the FBI was investigating Page’s ties to Russia and, after Trump’s success, Page travelled to Moscow for “unknown” reasons. In February 2017, it was discovered he had “been colluding with Russian intel officials during the election.” Spy agencies, including GCHQ, were not specifically targeting members of the Trump team but happened to gather evidence through what CNN reported as “incidental collection.” Their accidental intelligence was then passed to the US as part of a routine exchange under the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Page’s own direct connection to Jeff Sessions is not in doubt and, importantly, sources have also been publicly clear: “The Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page.”

Russian agents have not held back from commenting on Page either, highlighting his ambitions in the energy sector. “He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) said. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.” Page, it appears, shared a mutual interest with Burt. Christopher Steele’s controversial intelligence dossier went further, alleging Page met with the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft, Igor Sechin – a man described as one of President Vladimir Putin’s key deputies. According to the report, Page and Sechin discussed lifting sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and “support of pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine.”

  Byline

This is a lengthy article whose first two-thirds covers information about banking, Brexit and Russia. It's quite a lot more than I can absorb and assess. You might want to read it for yourself.

Patrick goes on after the business about Carter Page to discuss how Nigel Farage, infamous alt-right Brit whose name became well-known here because of the Brexit movement, is connected to the Trump cabal.

Aside from this monstrously deep web of US business links to Russia, along with speeches by British politicians, my investigations had already established more substantial collaborative efforts between the so-called “Bad Boys of Brexit”, the Trump campaign, and Russia. Yet, the Leave.EU connection was relevant at the time for one further reason: Roger Stone. During the 2016 campaign, Stone was accused by John Podesta of having prior knowledge of Wikileaks publishing his private emails which had been obtained by a hacker. In fact, before the leak, Stone tweeted: “It will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel,” and five days prior to the release he did it again, writing: “Wednesday Hillary Clinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Breitbart News, the Mercer and Bannon disinformation channel, also published a subsequent denial by Stone, in which he claimed he had no advance knowledge of the Podesta e-mail hack or any connection to Russian intelligence.

Patrick's conclusion nails the big picture for me:

I took the time to sit and review everything I’d uncovered so far and decided there was nothing so easy as a simple financial trail which would expose this global mess. Those days of investigative journalism were clearly dead, along with stories compacted to fit headlines and column inches. We were dealing with such a complex problem I still think the whole truth may never be known, especially if the assertions of Christopher Steele – that the cover-up operation began on Putin’s orders as soon as Trump won – are to be given credit. [...] This power play had gone directly for political and financial dominance on a scale which condemned the diplomatic wrangling of independent nations to the past, rendering countries standing as lone entities impotent.

It's always about the money.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



Seems highly likely, especially considering that Page said it was "a leave of absence."