What Happened to Carter Page?
Imiss Carter Page. It
seems like years since I have heard anything about the American businessman who
briefly volunteered at Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
It had been a long time since Steele had been to Russia. But he knew people who
knew people who had been told things by people who were close to people who had
the same name as someone who used to work for Vladimir Putin. Slam dunk. Fusion,
and therefore Steele, was paid in part through the law firm of Perkins Coie—it
took a while to find that out—which in turn was paid by Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It took a while to
find that out, too.
You remember Carter
Page. He was, along with the micturating prostitutes, one of the stars of The
Dossier™, the as-told-to novella by Christopher Steele, the leakin’-lyin’
former British spook who was commissioned by Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS to
compose this gritty fantasy.
Just about all major
political campaigns engage in opposition research. It’s not nice. But it is
business as usual. The great thing about being a Democrat, though, is that you
can surreptitiously pay for opposition research on your opponent and then, even
when the “research” is only hearsay—what would your history teacher say, Mr.
Steele?
Sources, sources!—even if it’s just made-up gossip, you can encourage your
friends in the CIA and other intelligence services to vouch for it and get the
FBI to petition for and receive multiple secret court warrants to spy on
American citizens who just happen to be connected with your political rival,
thus giving you access to your rival’s communications and setting up a pretext
for investigating him later on. Nicely done!And the great thing was, no one was supposed to know about the origin of The Dossier™. That is, we, the public, weren’t supposed to know that 1) Hillary Clinton paid for it or 2) that it was the only substantive basis for the warrant to spy on Carter Page.
Had Hillary Clinton
been elected president—I feel a little queasy even saying that, like the
characters in the Harry Potter novels who avoid uttering the name
“Voldemort”—if she-who-will-not-be-named had been elected, we would never have
known about these shenanigans. Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak would have
covered the entire saga and Hillary would have gone about her business
destroying America. Amazing.
It’s great being a
Democrat. What can you not do with impunity? Drive a girl off a bridge into the
water, leave her to suffocate, while you try to get an aide to take the rap and
you wait 10 hours before telling the police what happened? No problem. Been
there, done that.
But if you’re a
Republican? Ask Mrs. Paul Manafort how she liked being rudely awakened in the
wee hours by FBI agents who had broken into her house and, waving their guns,
patted her down in case she was concealing a Kalashnikov in her night dress.
The actual charge was bank fraud from 2005, but as with Carter Page The
Dossier™ had other lurid takes to tell:
Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016,
Source B, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential
candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of
co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the
TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who
was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries.
The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential
candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and
feared.
Pathetic, or rather
PATHETIC, isn’t it? I think my favorite part of The Dossier™ that concerns
Carter Page is towards the end when Page is accused of colluding (remember the
word “colluding”? It was so popular for a while) with a Russian energy magnate.
The deal was that if Donald Trump were elected, Carter Page would get a
commission of “up to 19 percent” from the sale of the gas giant Rosneft and he
and President Trump would then lift sanctions on Russia. I am not sure how many
millions of dollars that 19 percent would amount to, but it would certainly
qualify as one of the biggest payoffs in history.
We haven’t heard much
about Carter Page recently because, after more than a year of sleuthing, Robert
Mueller and his pack of bloodhounds have turned up—nothing. Nada. Riens. Nihil.
Instead they have been sniffing around Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump’s personal
lawyer, and anyone else who might have something, anything, compromising about
the president.
This illegal partisan
witch hunt had a few off-Broadway moments before Carter Page stepped on to the
stage, but his story was at the center of the first prime-time episode. Where
did he go? He was the pretext for mobilizing the leviathan that is the police
power of the United States of America against private citizens. All those G-men
and wiretaps and raids and subpoenas. It all revolved around a beta-minus actor
in this drama who never had anything other than a tenuous relationship to
Donald Trump or his campaign and who was certainly not making multi-million
dollar deals with highly placed Russians. The Narrative has moved on from
Carter Page. There was nothing there.
Let me employ another
pop culture analogy. The Rosenstein-Mueller witch hunt is like that deep-space
probe at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back.” Thousands of scary-looking
droids have been deployed around the galaxy. So far, they’ve all come back
empty. Maybe one will discover some rebels in a frozen Siberian tundra. I
wouldn’t count on it, though. More likely is that the next installment of
Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Justice Department
malfeasance—due any moment—will do for Mueller’s investigation what the Death
Star did to the planet Alderaan.
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