NEW YORK — Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page on Tuesday discussed his encounters with an FBI confidential source during the 2016 campaign, saying he “never found anything unusual.”
Page said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that he first met the individual while attending an academic conference at Cambridge University in July 2016, a week after his visit to Russia.
“I never found anything unusual, whatsoever,” Page told Cooper about their conversations.
Page said he and the source stayed in contact for more than a year, including meeting up back in the United States.
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“We would talk about various things that are happening. And, you know, he’s someone who is, you know, long term, someone who had been in, part of the establishment in Republican politics. So typically around the convention time and halfway through a presidential year you keep bringing on more people in terms of potential supporters from the party, etc., and it just seemed like something like that,” he said.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly alleged that the FBI planted a spy inside his presidential campaign, and has ordered the Justice Department to look at whether the FBI was politically motivated.
CNN previously reported that according to US officials, a confidential source was not placed inside the Trump campaign to provide information to investigators.
However, Trump continued to reiterate his claims on Wednesday evening, writing in two separate posts on Twitter:
…Follow the money! The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported Collusion with Russia, because there was no Collusion. He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win – just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018
On Tuesday evening, Page declined to say whether he thought the FBI source was actually a spy infiltrating Trump’s presidential campaign.
“We’ll see,” Page said. “There’s increasingly … this is drip, drip, drip.”
When pressed again, Page said, “I don’t like to make accusations without hard facts.”
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