When Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak traveled to the GOP convention last summer, he met with then Sen. Jeff Sessions, as well as with two other Trump campaign advisers, including oil industry consultant Carter Page.

Page, at the time an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Trump, engaged in a conversation with the ambassador at the same July 20 luncheon in Cleveland where Sessions, now attorney general, and Kislyak chatted, according to J.D. Gordon, a national security adviser to the Trump campaign who was also present at the lunch.


Page declined to comment Thursday about what he and the Russian ambassador discussed, saying it was a private, off-the-record conversation. "Everyone assumes everything is nefarious!" Page said in a text message. "Thanks, but no comment."

Contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign staff are now the subject of investigations by the FBI and congressional committees into Russian interference in the election, and whether Trump campaign representatives played any role in it. On Thursday, Sessions recused himself from investigations into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election in Trump's favor.

The disclosure that other Trump officials met with Kislyak raise additional questions about White House assertions that the Trump campaign had little or no contact with Russian officials prior to the election.

Page's conversation with Kislyak just days after news reports of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee is part of a broader pattern of activity by Page that raised U.S. suspicions about his interactions with the Russians, according to a former Obama White House official. At the time of the lunch, Page had just returned from a trip to Moscow.

The official said the Obama administration was gravely concerned in its final days about increasingly apparent ties between Trump associates and Russians, and about what appeared to be promises made by more than one individual to people affiliated with Russian President Vladimir Putin about policy changes that would occur once Trump was sworn in as president. The Obama official declined to discuss specifics but said Page was one of the Trump associates whose activities had drawn the most U.S. attention and concern.

Trump has defended Sessions. White House spokesman Sean Spicer repeated Thursday afternoon that Sessions and other officials have not done anything wrong. "There's no there there," Spicer told reporters.

Gordon, a retired Navy commander, said Page and Kislyak spoke at some length about how to improve relations between the two countries on issues like counterterrorism and energy security. "Carter told him we should have a new chapter of U.S.-Russia relations that build on mutual respect and common goals and that there is no need to keep up this hostility," Gordon said. "He said we should have better relations with Russia."

He added that Kislyek suggested the two countries cooperate "so that we don’t have problems like the Tsarnaev brothers," the Chechen-Americans who set off two pressure-cooker bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, more than a year after Russia tried to warn U.S. officials about one of them.

Page and Sessions were among several people affiliated with the Trump campaign who engaged with Kislyak while in Cleveland, including at the lunch, which was part of a State Department-funded initiative to bring foreign ambassadors to both political conventions, Gordon said. "The Trump campaign advisers were there to interact with the ambassadors, just like [the ambassadors] were interacting with the Democrats in Philadelphia the next week," Gordon said. "That was the whole point of the program."

Trump officials have distanced themselves from Page, who left the campaign in late September. The founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, Page spent seven years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, Moscow and New York. His website says he has been involved in more than $25 billion of transactions in the energy and power sector, and that he spent 3 years in Moscow where he was an adviser on key transactions for Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom and other energy-related companies.

After Trump identified Page as one of his foreign policy and energy advisers last March, Page said in a Bloomberg News interview that he had been an investor in, and adviser to, the Gazprom. He also criticized the Obama administration sanctions on Russia imposed because of its annexation of Crimea.

Officially, Page's role was "advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia," according to a campaign release at the time. Throughout the spring and summer, Page sent policy memos to the campaign and kept in contact with Trump’s national security advisory board, including Sessions, Gordon said. "He wanted access to Trump, he wanted his policy memos to be reflected in Trump speeches. And he wanted to go to Russia, which we thought was a bad idea," he added.

He said Page was discourage from taking that trip by some campaign officials but went anyway after others in the campaign approved the trip, though he was told he could not represent the campaign.

During the trip, two weeks before the GOP convention, Page made remarks critical of U.S. policy at an event in Moscow held by a Russian organization with ties to pro-Putin oligarchs. At the time, Page refused to comment on whether he was meeting with Russian officials. "It was a terrible idea," Gordon said of the trip. "It just reflected negatively on the campaign, because people drew conclusions that weren’t there. And he fed right into it and walked right into the lion's den."

By September, three months after his conversation with Kislyak in Cleveland, U.S. intelligence officials were seeking to determine whether Page had opened up private communications with senior Russian officials, Yahoo News reported, including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee became president.

After lawmakers were briefed on suspected efforts by Russia to meddle in the election, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada asked FBI Director James Comey to investigate meetings between a Trump official, later identified as Page, and "high ranking sanctioned individuals" in Moscow who Reid believed were evidence of "significant and disturbing ties" between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

In late September, as allegations of ties between Page and Russian officials intensified, he took leave from the campaign. His name later appeared repeatedly in the controversial dossier on Trump–Russia ties compiled by a former British Intelligence operative that alleges a pattern of interactions between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

On Thursday, Page said he's never been questioned by the FBI, insisted that he has done nothing wrong and blamed Democrats and the Clinton campaign for drumming up false allegations against him.

When pressed for details of his talk with Kislyak and his visits to Moscow, Page said, "Go ask the Clinton campaign and associates about their illegal activities. That's a real story for you, as opposed to this same fake news theme."

Page wrote Comey in September asking the FBI director to quickly clear him of wrongdoing, saying what a "complete waste of time this witch-hunt directed at me is," and blaming the Clinton campaign, the media and others. He said his July 7 commencement address at the New Economic School in Moscow was based on his scholarly research, that his visit was "outside of my informal, unpaid role" on the Trump campaign and that he had divested any stake in Gazprom. Also, he said, he had "not met this year with any sanctioned official in Russia despite the fact that there are no restrictions on U.S. persons speaking with such individuals."

Three weeks ago, Page wrote to the Justice Department, asking to be publicly cleared. In the 37-page letter, Page said that besides harming his reputation and ability to advise the Trump campaign, the "continued false questions aimed at me also carry immediate risks to U.S. national security as political opponents of the President try to derail his agenda – most likely their main objective for this whole exercise."

Page said that he has not heard from either the FBI or Justice Department on the status of any investigations. Kislyak and the press office at the Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Thursday night, Page initially evaded questions on whether he met with Kislyak in Cleveland, before saying, "I'm not going to deny that I talked to him. Although I will say that I never met him anywhere outside of Cleveland, let’s just say that much.”

Page also denied acting as a liaison between Russia and the Trump campaign, and said he “was not aware of” speaking to any intelligence officials during his July 2016 visit to Moscow, where he met with “scholars and professors and some students there.”

Page also refused to answer whether he was in contact with anyone at the White House, saying that while he knows “various people there ... I don't talk about any specific discussions.”