before the candidate’s meeting with the Post’s editorial board, Page had been questioned by the FBI—not for the first time—about his ties to Russian intelligence. In fact, by that point the bureau had been tracking Page, intermittently, for at least three years in connection with an FBI probe of a Russian spy ring in New York.
Page was aware of the bureau’s interest. Back in June 2013, he had met with FBI agents at New York’s Plaza hotel (once owned by Donald Trump until indebtedness forced him to sell), insisting that his contacts with Russians were related to “my research on international political economy” and that any documents he had provided related to the energy business. He made it clear that he was doing the FBI a favor by assisting them voluntarily because, he said helpfully, “it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated toward addressing real national security threats, particularly given the recent Boston Marathon bombing.”
As part of their surveillance, the bureau had lengthy transcripts of Kremlin agents describing their efforts to recruit and manipulate Page. Portions of those transcripts appeared in a 2015 complaint filed in the Southern District of New York—referring to Page anonymously as “Male-1.” The Russians’ conversation had been captured by a listening device the FBI had planted on a binder the Kremlin operatives had unwittingly carried into a conference room. They spoke of Page with undisguised scorn, frustrated and amused by his seemingly clueless behavior.
In his encounters with Page, Victor Podobnyy had cast himself as someone who could help the American pursue energy-related business deals in Russia. In reality, Podobnyy was an SVR agent posing as an attaché at the Russian mission to the United Nations. He marveled at Page’s affection for Russia and said of his American mark: “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do.”
Page later told the FBI that he had met Podobnyy in January 2013 at an energy industry conference in New York. The Russians regarded Page’s interest in oil riches as a vulnerability. Page “got hooked on Gazprom [the largely state-owned oil and gas company] thinking that if they have a project he could be rise up,” Podobnyy explained in the exchanges intercepted by the FBI, referring to the Russian energy giant. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money,” he concluded with a laugh.
On another recording, a different Kremlin operative, Igor Sporyshev, who was working undercover as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York, complained that the charade they were running would eventually mean that he would have to get involved with the bumbling American. Podobnyy brushed him off, saying that he would continue to “feed him empty promises” and eventually cut Page loose. “You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”
Page did provide documents to the Russians, though he later claimed to reporters that he had shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research.” He added that he furnished “nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester, ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets, and Technology’ course which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.” (Page, an adjunct professor at NYU, had twice failed to defend his PhD thesis at the University of London before finally earning his doctorate.)[1]
In the end, the FBI probe had limited results. The two Russians caught speaking about Page were protected from prosecution in the United States by diplomatic immunity. A third, however, was under what intelligence agencies call “non-official cover”—that is, using phony private sector credentials rather than working out of an embassy or consulate. Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as an executive at Vnesheconombank, a Russian development bank, was arrested and convicted of espionage as part of a broader case in which Page was only a small player. Buryakov served a thirty-month sentence before he was released in 2017 and deported to Russia. Page was never accused of wrongdoing, in part because the bureau was never sure that he knew he was interacting with Russian spies.
His brush with the FBI did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for Russia. In the ensuing years Page continued to travel to Moscow, pursue business deals there, and publish articles and blog posts that read like Kremlin talking points. In one remarkable 2014 piece for Global Policy—a scholarly publication of Durham University in England—Page praised a particularly controversial Putin ally. Igor Sechin was Russia’s former deputy prime minister and chairman of the Rosneft energy conglomerate. He was also one of the oligarchs sanctioned by the United States to punish Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. Page wrote of Sechin with reverence, saying that he had “done more to advance U.S.-Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade.” A year later, Page likened the rationale behind the American sanctions to one of the nation’s darkest legacies, equating the effort to dissuade Moscow from meddling in other countries to an 1850 guide on how to produce “the ideal slave.”
In December 2015, Page sought a volunteer position with the Trump campaign by reaching out to Ed Cox, the son-in-law of former president Richard Nixon and the chairman of the New York State Republican Party. Cox, who was directing would-be volunteers to many of the GOP candidates, helped Page get an appointment with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. When Page arrived at Trump Tower, he encountered an overwhelmed political operative who interrupted their conversation repeatedly to answer calls on a pair of incessantly ringing cell phones. Lewandowski took Page next door to the office of Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host from Iowa serving as the Trump campaign cochairman.
After a cursory background check that involved little more than a Google search, Clovis added Page’s name on the list of advisers that Trump carried into his meeting with the Post.
Former colleagues, business associates, and teachers struggled to make sense of Page’s new profile. His adviser at the Naval Academy recalled a student who was a striver, opportunistic but eccentric. “I always found him a little out of place,” said Stephen E. Frantzich,[2] a political science and history professor who supervised Page’s work on a research paper. Page was a “geeky kid, a good writer and hard worker” who displayed no particular interest in Russia. Yet Page claimed in an interview decades later that he was specifically drawn to the academy after seeing two officers in naval uniforms standing in the background on television coverage of U.S.-Russia arms negotiations in the 1980s. Page, then a teenager in Poughkeepsie, New York, said, “I came in off the street on my skateboard and I watched the summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.” The naval uniforms made him think “that’s interesting, maybe that’s some kind of way of getting involved and helping out.”
After five years in the Navy, which included an assignment as an intelligence officer for a UN peacekeeping mission in Morocco, Page devoted himself to chasing riches. In 2004, he moved to Moscow for the position with Merrill Lynch. The title he was given, vice president, sounded more glamorous than the tasks it entailed—planning meetings and drafting papers for the firm’s principals. But Page later depicted himself as a heavy hitter, setting up transactions involving billions of dollars and serving as an adviser to Gazprom. Sergey Aleksashenko, chairman of Merrill Lynch Russia at the time, described Page’s claims as outlandish and said that he reacted to hearing Trump had named him an adviser by “laughing, because he [Page] was never ready to discuss foreign policy.”
Page left Moscow in 2007 and made his way to New York, where he continued to embellish his Moscow business record and social life, even claiming to have had a long-term romance with a Bolshoi ballerina. His company, Global Energy Capital, had a website decorated with stock photos of oil derricks and the Manhattan skyline, but listed no employees or clients. In interviews, Page spoke of working in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that shared an atrium with Trump Tower. In reality, the office he occupied was a windowless room rented by the hour in a corporate coworking space.
For Page, the stars suddenly aligned when a billionaire businessman declared he was pursuing the
