Senators asked Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, to provide a list of files on any dealings with Russian officials or business representatives

A Senate committee has asked Trump campaign aides to hand over notes and records from meetings with Russian officials and businesses, as congressional investigations between the president’s associates and Moscow appear to regain momentum.

In a letter to Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser, dated 28 April, the Republican and Democratic leadership of the Senate intelligence committee asked him to attend a closed hearing and provide a list of documents on any dealings with “any Russian official or representative of Russian business interests” between June 2015 and January this year.

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Similar letters are reported to have gone to several other figures in Trump’s circle, including an informal adviser, Roger Stone, according to the New York Times.

On Friday, Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr and his Democratic counterpart, Mark Warner, warned Page that if he did not submit the relevant documents by next Tuesday, the committee would “consider its next steps at that time”, an apparent threat of subpoena.

In a grudging reply to the Senate seen by the Guardian, Page said he would try to comply with the committee’s “request for even more irrelevant data”.

“As previously noted, I remain committed to helping the Senate select committee on intelligence in any way that I can,” Page wrote. “But please note that any records I may have saved as a private citizen with limited technology capabilities will be miniscule in comparison to the full database of information which has already been collected under the direction of the Obama administration.”

Page said he had been the target last year of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) warrant, which are normally issued when intelligence or law enforcement agencies can show probable cause that the subject is in the service of a foreign power.

Page, an energy consultant named last year by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, travelled to Moscow in July 2016 to give an academic talk. He has denied reports that at the same time he met with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, and head of the state-run Rosneft oil company.

The Senate committee has asked Page to provide a “list of all meetings between you and any Russian official or representative of Russian business interests” during the campaign, or any such meetings he is aware of involving anyone linked to the Trump campaign.

The letter also asks for “communications records, including electronic communications records, such as email or text messages, written correspondent and phone records” of contacts with Russian officials or business people, or “related in any to Russia” as well as records of his financial or real estate holdings in that country.



In a joint statement on Friday, Burr and Warner voiced irritation at Page’s response to the committee so far, noting that he claimed in a television interview that he was cooperating with their committee.

“Today we have learned that may not be the case,” the senators said, urging Page to submit the records by the 9 May deadline they laid down.

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The Senate committee letters are one of several signs that Senate and House investigations were regaining speed after concerns were raised last month that Republicans were trying to stifle them.

After it was reported in the Daily Beast that the Senate committee investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election only had seven part-time staffers – not one of whom was a trained investigator – the committee hired two more professional staff, including the former head of intelligence law at the National Security Agency, April Doss.

A parallel House inquiry also appears to have revived after its former chair, Devin Nunes, a close Trump ally, stepped aside in early April after it was discovered he was being leaked information by the White House and had not informed other members of the committee.

The ranking Democrat on the House committee, Adam Schiff, who has emerged as a driving force behind the congressional investigations, said that he had much better cooperation with Nunes’s successor, Mike Conaway.

“We are making progress. Mike Conaway and I have worked together in the last several weeks ... in a very non-partisan, very matter of fact way,” Schiff told MSNBC. “We are back to scheduling our witnesses ... We are back to getting new documents from the intelligence community. So things are moving in a very positive direction.”

The California congressman said the committee’s revival was important because “we have very limited resources and so does the Senate, so if either one of these investigations were to gets derailed it would mean only half of the eyes on task”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carter Page, an energy consultant named by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, has been told to provide a list of all meetings with ‘any Russian official or representative’. Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP

In particular, the committee has asked to hear from Sally Yates, a former acting attorney general fired by Trump, whose initial scheduled appearance was cancelled by Nunes at short notice. Yates could provide testimony damaging to the administration, as she had warned the White House in January that the national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was vulnerable to blackmail because he had not disclosed conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn was forced to resign over the contacts in February.

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Yates will give her first public comments on the case to the Senate on Monday, where she will be questioned by a special sub-committee of the Senate judiciary committee chaired by Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican who has been strongly critical of Trump’s pro-Moscow comments. Yates will appear alongside the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and is expected to contradict the White House version of what it knew about the Flynn-Kislyak contacts.

Scott Horton, a lawyer specialising in anti-corruption cases with broad experience of the former Soviet Union said the Republican leadership had been unable to kill off the congressional investigations.

“The Republicans have decided that the game of stalling the investigations entirely, as Nunes had tried to do, was backfiring in a big way, and that they were taking a drubbing in opinion polls where there has been a steady shift to calling for an independent commission, which is the worst outcome for them. They want to have some control.”

Horton said the congressional inquiries still lacked sufficient staff to carry out a proper investigation. In particular, he argued, they needed experts in forensic accounting with an understanding of post-Soviet financial practices, and techniques used by oligarchs to mask asset transfers.

“There are a lot of FBI agents with this kind of expertise. They shouldn’t be hard to find,” he said.