Donald Trump campaign disavows Russian operative Carter Page, claims it’s been threatening to sue him
Now that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former Donald Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page are admitting to having jointly met with the Russian Ambassador during the election, the Trump campaign has decided to disavow Page entirely, in an apparent attempt at protecting Sessions. Trump’s campaign officials are now going to far as to dubiously claim they’ve been sending cease and desist letters to Carter Page all along.
Earlier today we reported that we were able to confirm that Jeff Sessions had in fact first introduced Donald Trump to Carter Page nearly a year ago, because a local television affiliate in Alabama had documented the meeting in obscure fashion. But the Donald Trump campaign is now doing damage control today, insisting instead that it was Republican operative Sam Clovis who first brought Page into fold. The campaign is also disavowing Page in spectacular fashion.
Today the Trump campaign spoke with conservative site Daily Caller, which is essentially serving as a Trump mouthpiece. Not only did the campaign to try insulate Jeff Sessions from Carter Page, it also painted Page as some kind of fraud who has been lying about his role in the campaign. This passage comes from the Daily Caller article, which again we don’t take as legitimate, but rather a de facto Trump campaign press release: “The Trump team issued a number of cease and desist requests to Page in recent months over concerns that he was misrepresenting his role on the campaign.”
It’s overwhelmingly difficult to believe that the Trump campaign believed Carter Page was lying about his role in the campaign for months, to the point that it repeatedly threatened to sue him over it, yet it didn’t think to publicly disavow him until today. This feels much more like the campaign throwing Page under the bus today by scandalizing him to take media attention away from the Jeff Sessions scandal. Contribute to Palmer Report
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report