Carter Page

Carter William Page is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business. He served in the U.S. Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

About Carter Page in brief

Summary Carter PageCarter William Page is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business. Page was a focus of the 2017 Special Counsel investigation into links between Trump associates and Russian officials. In April 2019, the Mueller Report concluded that the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated in Russia’s interference efforts. In August 2020, Simon & Schuster published Page’s book, Abuse and Power: How an Innocent American Was Framed in an Attempted Coup Against the President. He served in the U.S. Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission, and attained the rank of lieutenant. In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm’s London office, was a vice president in the company’s Moscow office, and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch’s energy and power department in New York. In 2012, he received a PhD degree from SOAS, University of London in 2012, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner. He later ran an international affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy politics at New York University. In more recent years, he has written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University. He sought unsuccessfully to publish his dissertation on the transition of Asian countries from communism to capitalism.

One of his original examiners said Page knew next to nothing about the subject matter and was unfamiliar with basic concepts such as Marxism and state capitalism. In 2017, Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, recalled on Twitter that Page’s strong pro-Russian and anti-American bias on his Twitter feed was “very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real stuff out without any kind of argument” He later wrote that he blamed the rejection on anti-Russian bias on Page’s Twitter feed. In 2019 the Justice Department determined the last two of four FISA warrants to surveil Page were invalid. The building which contains Page’s working space is connected to Trump Tower by an atrium, a fact Page referenced when describing his work for the 2016 Trump campaign in a 2017 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The fund operates out of a Manhattan co-working space shared with a booking agency for wedding bands, and as of late 2017, Page was the firm’s sole employee. In 2016, Page has stated that he worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading Russian energy companies. According to business people interviewed by Politico, Page’s work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers. In 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy capital, with partner James Richard, a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko.