Carter Page, who served as a foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign, was known to U.S. counterintelligence officials for years before he became a prominent figure in a dossier of unverified research about the future president’s ties to Russia.

The White House is expected to release as early as this week a memo detailing what Republicans allege were surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign. Republicans say the memo, written by the GOP staff on the House Intelligence Committee, shows that prosecutors used information gleaned from an ex-British spy—who was paid by a research firm hired by Democratic opponents of Mr. Trump—in their application for a secret court order to monitor Mr. Page. Mr. Page hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday urged the White House not to release the memo, citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Democrats have also said the document is misleading and cherry-picked.

“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counterintelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), an ally of Mr. Trump who serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who directed the writing of the memo.

The FBI said the memo contains significant omissions about the surveillance decisions made during the time period in question.


Yet a question persists: What prompted the FBI to suspect that Mr. Page was acting as an agent of Russia?

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and directed the writing of the memo detailing what Republicans allege were surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The full extent of the evidence regarding Mr. Page that the Justice Department submitted to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—a secret judicial panel that approves surveillance warrants against suspected agents of foreign powers—isn’t clear. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that the warrant included material beyond research compiled by Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official. What is known from court documents and testimony by Mr. Page before Congress is that the former Trump aide has been known to U.S. counterintelligence officials dating back to at least 2013, nearly three years before he joined the Trump campaign.

The dispute between the White House and the FBI comes against the backdrop of a federal investigation, now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, into whether Trump associates colluded in the Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump has denied collusion, and Moscow has denied election meddling. Mr. Page has called the investigation “baseless.”

Mr. Page’s dealings with Russia date back to more than a decade before Mr. Trump ran for president and his opponents began crafting the dossier.


For three years, starting in 2004, Mr. Page was living in Moscow, where he opened an office for the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch & Co. He also served as an adviser on “key transactions” involving the Russian state-owned energy company PAO Gazprom and RAO UES, the Russian state-controlled electricity monopoly, according to Mr. Page’s biography.

In January 2013, Mr. Page was in New York at an Asia Society event on China and energy development, when he met Victor Podobnyy, a junior attaché at the Russian consulate in New York City who was in the audience, Mr. Page told the House Intelligence Committee last fall.

In March 2013, Mr. Page met with Mr. Podobnyy again over coffee or a Coke, he told the House panel in his testimony. Mr. Page, asked why he had sought out Mr. Podobnyy a second time, said he wanted to practice his Russian.

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That June, three years before the 2016 presidential campaign and the creation of the dossier, Mr. Page had his first known brush with a U.S. counterintelligence official. He was interviewed by FBI counterintelligence agent Gregory Monaghan and another FBI agent, who were investigating whether Mr. Podobnyy was a Russian intelligence agent, according to a criminal complaint.


In 2015, Mr. Podobnyy was charged with posing as a U.N. attaché under diplomatic cover while trying to recruit Mr. Page as a Russian intelligence source. The criminal complaint filed by U.S. federal prosecutors alleged Mr. Podobnyy was an agent for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. The complaint also detailed Mr. Podobnyy’s discussion in April 2013 with Igor Sporyshev, a second alleged SVR agent posing as a Russian trade representative, about efforts to recruit “a male working as a consultant in New York City.” Mr. Podobnyy was afforded diplomatic immunity and left the country.

In a statement last year, Mr. Page confirmed he was the unnamed consultant and said he helped U.S. federal investigators during the case. The complaint charging Mr. Podobnyy said Mr. Page had provided the Russians with documents, which Mr. Page said were “nothing more than a few samples from the more detailed lectures” he was preparing for a course he was teaching at New York University at the time.

Asked for comment Wednesday, Mr. Page forwarded a 23-page letter from May 2017 addressed to the House Intelligence Committee in which he said the Justice Department under President Barack Obama was best described by the final scene in the movie “The Big Short,” which shows that bankers went effectively unpunished for their role in the financial crisis of 2007.

“After essentially achieving very little in his six-years in office, it is understandable why [then-Attorney General Eric] Holder might want to target a token Russian banker during his final months in office,” Mr. Page wrote.


Mr. Page said at his June 2013 meeting with U.S. counterintelligence agents, he discussed “at length” his research on the international political economy, “because it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated towards addressing real national security threats.” He added that the “harsh retribution” he subsequently faced “marked a direct retaliation.”

Six months after prosecutors charged Mr. Podobnyy, Mr. Trump launched his presidential campaign. In January 2016, Mr. Page told the House committee, he had an “initial meeting” with the campaign and began serving as an informal adviser.

In March 2016, in an interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Trump officially named Mr. Page as a member of his foreign policy advisory committee. Also named to the committee: George Papadopoulos, who last year pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians during the campaign.

A former Trump national security adviser said the campaign wasn’t aware at the time of Mr. Page’s past dealings with U.S. counterintelligence officials.

Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Page traveled to Russia at least twice and kept top Trump campaign advisers abreast of his travels, Mr. Page told the House panel.

When it comes to the Russia investigation, the word ‘collusion’ gets thrown around a lot. But there's not a lot of clarity on what it actually means. Is it illegal? Is it grounds for impeachment? We asked a law professor to explain. Photo Illustration: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal.

In July 2016, Mr. Page delivered a lecture in Moscow hosted by the New Economics School to a packed auditorium on his thoughts about global economics trends. In the speech, he criticized the U.S. and European states for their behavior toward states of the former Soviet Union for their “often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”

Mr. Page told attendees that the thoughts in his speech, delivered in English, were strictly his own and didn’t represent the opinions of any current or former employer. He declined to answer questions after the speech about U.S. politics, saying that the purpose of his speech was academic, and refused to meet with reporters, leaving the auditorium through an exit backstage.

Mr. Page told the House that while in Moscow, he “briefly said hello” to Arkady Dvorkovich, deputy prime minister of Russia, and met with Andrey Baranov, head of investor relations at Russian oil giant PAO Rosneft.

Toward the end of his trip, Mr. Page emailed campaign aides Tera Dahl and J.D. Gordon and told them he would send a “readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here.”

Mr. Gordon said in an interview that he didn’t recall the email.

U.S. investigators are looking into contacts between several current and former associates of Donald Trump and Russian individuals—some with direct ties to the Russian government or state-owned entities. WSJ's Niki Blasina provides a who's who of the Russians at the center of the investigations.

That fall, the Justice Department requested a secret court order to monitor Mr. Page’s ties to Russia, using as part of its request information from Mr. Steele, according to people familiar with the matter. It isn’t clear whether the department had previously requested a FISA warrant on Mr. Page, who left the Trump campaign in September amid reports about his ties to Russia.

At the time, Mr. Steele was working for Fusion GPS, a research firm that was being paid by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Before hiring Mr. Steele, the firm’s research had been paid for by a conservative news outlet that opposed Mr. Trump. Mr. Steele ultimately produced a 35-page dossier, which Mr. Trump has dismissed as false.

Mr. Page’s name surfaced repeatedly in the fall of 2016 in classified briefings given to high-level members of Congress, according to people familiar with the matter. That was around the same time the FBI and the Justice Department were applying for a surveillance warrant against Mr. Page in the FISA court.

A month after Mr. Trump won the presidential election, Mr. Page traveled to Russia again. There, he met again with Messrs. Dvorkovich and Baranov, among others, Mr. Page told the House panel.

The following spring, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general appointed by Mr. Trump, approved a renewal of surveillance of Mr. Page.

—Alan Cullison and Brett Forrest contributed to this article.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com and Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com