The FBI has a taste for vengeance.
Former 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page endured years of slanderous press coverage framing him as a covert Russian agent all because he refused to work for the FBI as a federal informant. That much is apparent based on an outline of the Page surveillance by the FBI revealed in the bombshell report by Special Counsel John Durham on Monday.
Page, a former energy consultant, began working for the Trump campaign in March 2016. His past experience in the energy industry included contact with Russian nationals between 2009 and 2013, leading the FBI to interview Page in 2015. The interview surrounded three Russian intelligence officers indicted by the Southern District of New York.
“Page had been approached by the intelligence officers in an apparently failed recruitment effort,” the Durham report reads. Page’s refusal to work as a covert agent for the FBI seemed to provoke animosity within the agency that would later frame the prominent consultant as a covert agent of the Russian government. One intelligence officer called Page an “idiot,” according to Durham, and complained about Page’s resistance to recruitment.
“In April 2016, shortly after Page was named as an advisor to the Trump campaign, the [New York Field Office] opened a counterintelligence investigation of him,” Durham’s report reads.
The investigation was moved from the New York field office to the FBI headquarters under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey. According to the Durham report, Comey repeatedly pressed Deputy
