BuzzFeed News obtained the court filing for the case, which included a transcript of a conversation between the alleged spy, Victor Podobny, and another Russian operative, Igor Sporyshev, about trying to recruit someone identified as “Male-1.”
Page confirmed to Buzzfeed that he was “Male-1.” But he said in a statement later that his personal identity was made “easily identifiable” in the court documents because the US government wanted to punish him for his “public positions of dissent.”
“Throughout 2014, I wrote multiple academic articles on the foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration as exhibited most vividly in the botched ‘Reset’ with Russia,” Page said. “When this case was announced in January 2015 by Attorney General Holder during the final months of his term, the political vendetta tactics seen here also represented a clear retribution for my public positions of dissent.”
This is not the first time Page has alleged that he’s being targeted for opposing the US’s Russia policy.
The energy consultant-turned foreign policy adviser was named in an unverified dossier about Trump’s ties to Russia as a liaison between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. His trips to Moscow and contact with at least one Russian official last year are now reportedly under FBI investigation.
Page has called accusations that he served as a liaison an “illegal” form of “retribution” for a speech he gave in Moscow at the New Economic School last July, in which he slammed the US for its “hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”
Page took a “leave of absence” from the Trump campaign in September after news broke of his July trip to Moscow, and the campaign later denied that he had ever worked with it. The White House says Trump has no relationship with Page.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Page said he “decided to step back” from the campaign so that he could “more effectively fight these allegations independently and not create a further distraction for my colleagues.”
The letter also included a bullet-pointed argument suggesting his trip to Russia should be characterized as a “hate crime” committed by the Clinton campaign, which he said discriminated against him because he is a “Roman Catholic,” a “veteran,” and “male.”
A couple months after requesting the DOJ’s help in combatting Clinton’s “hate crimes” against him, however, Page now says the DOJ has been out to get him.
“My personal identity and earlier assistance of federal authorities in the 2015 case of U.S.A. v. BURYAKOV, SPORYSHEV and PODOBNYY was framed in an easily identifiable way that amplified the reputational damage against me,” Page said.
“As I explained to federal authorities prior to the January 2015 filing of this case, I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobny who then served as a junior attaché at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations,” he added.
According to court documents from the Justice Department, Podobny was posing as a diplomat in New York City while actually acting as an agent of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the SVR. From January-June 2013, Page met with, emailed with, and “provided documents to [Podobnyy] about the energy business,” according to the criminal complaint.
It is unlikely Page knew Podobnyy was a spy, however. Podobnyy himself appeared to acknowledge that he was using Page as a “useful idiot” for intelligence-gathering purposes.
Page “wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev, according to the transcripts obtained by BuzzFeed.
“I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. … He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up,” Podobnyy said. “I also promised him a lot … this is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go f— himself.”
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