Russian spy brags about how he first recruited Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Carter Page

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If you’ve watched Donald Trump’s Russian-connected campaign adviser Carter Page in recent television interviews and concluded that he might be a mere patsy or stooge in the scandal, it turns out there’s a Russian spy who agrees with your assessment. In fact that spy is openly gloating about how he recruited Page and then took advantage of him, by offering him things he had no intention of ever delivering on.

The story comes from RawStory via BuzzFeed, and centers around Victor Podobnyy, a Russian man who has been charged by the Untied States government with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (translation: a spy). Podobnyy has admitted to having recruited Carter Page all the way back in 2013, promising him a swift rise in Russian company Gazprom. That was enough to entice Page to hand over important documents. But as Podobnyy later bragged about his recruiting of Page, “You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”

By that time Carter Page had already spent a few years working for Merrill Lynch in Russia, before coming back to New York City to launch his own company with the aim of collaborating with Gazprom. Page’s timeline is somewhat murky in the few years prior to the 2016 presidential election cycle. But as Palmer Report has previously reported (link), then-Senator and current Attorney General Jeff Sessions first introduced Carter Page to Donald Trump in March 2016, and at that point he became a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.

Page traveled back to Moscow in the summer of 2016 to give a pro-Russia speech, and after his connections to Russia began generating too much controversy in the media, he parted ways with the Donald Trump campaign in late September. This latest revelation about a Russian spy having recruited Carter Page as early as 2013 (link: RawStory) lends credence to the suspicion that the Kremlin planted Page in the Trump campaign as a mole or go-between. What did Trump and Sessions know about this, and when did they know it? Contribute to Palmer Report