Moscow: When Donald Trump named a little-known US energy consultant as part of his foreign policy team, the adviser’s ex-boss was puzzled; how could the relatively junior banker he knew in Moscow a decade ago be qualified to brief a presidential candidate? Carter Page, who worked in Russia at US investment bank Merrill Lynch, paints an impressive picture of his three-year stint from 2004, saying on his company’s website that he advised on “key” transactions involving some of the country’s biggest energy groups.
But Sergey Aleksashenko, who became head of the bank’s Moscow operation towards the end of Page’s assignment, expressed doubts about whether he has the experience to act as an adviser on Washington’s fraught ties with the Kremlin.
“For me it was a strange choice,” said Aleksashenko, who served as a deputy finance minister and deputy central bank governor in the 1990s before running Merrill Russia in 2006-2008. “Carter was never a person who would discuss foreign policy or US-Russian relations.”
The achievements of Page — whom Trump named as an adviser in March — are summarised on the website of New York-based Global Energy Capital LLC, a firm that he founded after leaving Merrill. He did not respond to Reuters’ questions about his time in Russia and Merrill Lynch declined comment.
When contacted by Reuters, Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks played down Page’s role in the campaign. “Mr. Page is an informal adviser named as part of a much larger group several months ago. He does not speak for or represent the campaign in any official capacity,” she said.
Trump, who is now the Republican nominee, named Page as being among five foreign policy advisers in an interview with The Washington Post on March 21. Hicks did not answer Reuters questions seeking to clarify what Page had done since then for the campaign and why Trump had picked him.
Aleksashenko, a Kremlin critic, was Page’s boss in 2006-07 and is now a non-resident senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington.
Three other former Merrill employees in Moscow also told Reuters that Page could not have played a leading role in the bank’s deals due to his rank, and at the time showed no real interest or expertise in foreign policy.
Shortly after Trump named his foreign affairs team, campaign member Sam Clovis said the aim was to recruit people with “real-world” and military experience rather than the retreads that other candidates relied on.
“These are people who work for a living,” the New York Times quoted Clovis as saying. “If you’re looking for show ponies, you’re coming to the wrong stable.”
Clovis was not immediately available for further comment.
Russia has been a central issue in the US election campaign, with Trump calling President Vladimir Putin a “strong leader”.
Flattering coverage of Trump in Russian state media has left little doubt that he would be the Kremlin’s preferred candidate over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Like Trump, Page holds views that contradict the Obama administration’s stance on Russia and in recent years he has expressed them, reflecting the Kremlin’s views on occasions.
In a February 2015 article in the journal Global Policy, he said US policy towards Russia had been “misguided and provocative” and blamed the State Department for precipitating the Ukraine conflict.
In a speech given in Moscow last month, Page also criticised Western countries for what he said was their “hypocritical focus on democratisation” in the post-Soviet world. At the event, he did not respond to questions about his time in Russia.
Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, said Trump wanted to show the incompetence and weakness of the foreign policy pursued by the Democrats. Page was useful as his views fit with that aim, added Kortunov, who does not know the Trump adviser personally.
“There are people in the US who are bored with Ukraine, who think it is not an American problem that Washington should be involved in,” said Kortunov, whose think tank is close to the Russian Foreign Ministry but who has also expressed independent views.
Despite Hicks’s comments, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Reuters that when he left the campaign in late June, Page had “definitely” been an adviser to Trump.
