President Donald Trump's former campaign aide Carter Page, the man named at the center of a controversial GOP memo claiming FBI spying abuses, said Tuesday he has never spoken with the president in his life.
"I never spoke with him since. I never spoke with him any time in my life," Page told ABC "Good Morning America:" host George Stephanopoulos when the anchor asked Page, who served as Trump's foreign policy adviser, if he'd spoken with the president since the FBI started its surveillance of him in 2016.
"No email, no texts, nothing like that?" Stephanopoulos asked him.
"Never," Page replied.
According to a memo from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-California, which Trump declassified last Friday, a dossier funded in part by the Democratic National Committee and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign was central to obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] court warrant against Page.
He said Tuesday that the memo's revelations were worse than he could have imagined because "there is no basis for it."
"If you think about our Constitution, you know, due process rights, freedom of, you know, First Amendment rights, it was just shredded, the Constitution," Page told Stephanopoulos.
He also said claims that he gave documents to a person the FBI charged with espionage was "sort of spin."
"I was teaching a course down Broadway here at NYU and I told them a couple of things about what I was talking about in my course and I gave them a couple of my notes from or the documents that I gave my students," said Page. "It sounds a lot worse than reality, but that's reality."
He also downplayed reports that he had served as an adviser to the Kremlin, even though he wrote in 2013 that he had served as an informal adviser.
"There was a lot of people advising," said Page. "We were part of an informal group, you know, and meeting in Geneva, Paris and the New York Stock Exchange. The first meeting was in the New York Stock Exchange."
However, he said that the GOP memo pointed out that the FBI's spying was based on the "dodgy dossier," even though Democrats are saying there were other reasons for the FISA report.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.