Donald Trump administration takes new steps to try to throw Carter Page under the bus

| 7:04 pm EDT April 22, 2017
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Just one day after former Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page offered new revelation in a CNN interview, the Donald Trump administration is taking new steps to try to throw Page under the bus. This time around, the Trump team is once again relying on a friendly news outlet to float an unproven claim about Page in an attempt at discrediting him.

Back on March 2nd, Carter Page publicly admitted that he had met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention, as part of a Trump campaign envoy (source: NBC News). Just one day later on March 3rd, the Trump administration fired back by insisting that Page had never played a meaningful role in the campaign. To deliver this message it relied on Daily Caller, a conservative outlet loyal to Trump (link). The Trump administration also claimed that it had been sending cease and desist letters to Page, demanding that he stop overstating the role he played in the campaign. Daily Caller printed the claim without specifying whether it had seen any evidence of the supposed letters.

Then yesterday, April 21st, Carter Page appeared to hint to CNN that he might have been informing on the Trump campaign the entire time (link). And now today, April 22nd, the Trump administration is once again claiming that it’s been cease and desisting Page. This time Trump’s team is delivering the message through another friendly conservative outlet, Fox News, and it’s upping the stakes.

And this time around, Fox News is claiming that it has obtained a copy of the cease and desist letter in question (link). Fox does quote a bit of the letter, but even though uploading a photo or PDF of the letter would have been easy, Fox offers no evidence that the letter truly exists.

We won’t outright accuse Fox of lying about having seen the supposed letter. But given the overall track record of Fox News when it comes to honest reporting, we can’t merely take its word either. Trump’s team keeps relying on friendly news outlets to act as its mouthpiece regarding the supposed cease and desist letters, when it could easily just release copies of the letter to the media at large instead. And each time, it keeps tipping off that it’s concerned about what Carter Page had to say the day before. Contribute to Palmer Report