Transcripts of former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page’s seven-hour closed door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee were released on Monday night and paint a much different picture of Page’s interactions with Russian officials than he had previously described.

RELATED: Former Trump Aide Carter Page Refuses to Testify Before Senate Panel in Russia Probe, Says He’ll Plead 5th

NBC News reports:

In terse and sometimes heated exchanges with members of the committee, Page admitted that he had met with Russian officials and discussed the U.S. presidential election “in general terms.” He also met with the head of investor relations at Rosneft, a top Russian oil company. Page said the sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia may have come up in their discussion but “not directly.”

Page told the committee he wrote to Mueller on Oct. 5, explaining that he intends to plead the Fifth Amendment and keep documents related to his work in Russia to himself.

As has been previously reported, Page acknowledged that he may have met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich during the July 2016 trip.

In an email on July 8, Page told J.D. Gordon, a Trump campaign official, that he received “some incredible insights” from his meetings with Russian legislators and a few members of the presidential administration,” according to the testimony.

“During many public appearances prior to his November 2, 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in open session, Carter Page characterized his July 2016 trip to Russia as a private one in which his interactions with Russian individuals were largely confined to the ‘man on the street,’” Schiff said. “In his testimony, however, he was forced to acknowledge that he communicated with high level Russian officials while in Moscow, including one of Russia’s Deputy Prime Ministers. He also admitted notifying the fact of his meetings to his campaign supervisors.

Page previously said “[I have] no intention to plead the Fifth, since I’ve never done anything wrong.”

The White House claimed in the spring that Trump didn’t even know page, but Trump hitched himself to the former aidein tweets made on May 31.

Page’s new testimony confirms several of the details in the Steele dossier, as Business Insider notes:

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff confronted Page with an email he wrote on July 8 from Moscow to Trump campaign adviser J.D. Gordon saying that he had received “incredible insights and outreach from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here.”

Former British spy Christopher Steele wrote in the dossier that an “official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Political Department of the PA, DIVYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit.”

According to that official in the dossier, Diveykin told Page that the Kremlin had a dossier of kompromat on Hillary Clinton that they wanted to give to the Trump campaign.

In his congressional testimony, Page denied meeting with Diveykin and said the “senior members of the presidential administration” that he had referred to in his email was actually just “a brief, less-than-10-second chat with [deputy Prime Minister] Arkadiy Dvorkovich.”

Much more at BI.

As Towleroad’s Luis Damian Veron reported previously:

A partially-corroborated dossier on Trump regarding Russian intelligence operations surrounding his candidacy and campaign also led to a wiretap authorization for one of his aides, Carter Page, to investigate his ties to Russian agents, according to American officials briefed on the investigation.

The warrant was issued to the FBI last summer by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge due to probable cause that Page was working as an agent of a foreign power, namely Russia. The dossier made headlines earlier this year for some of its more salacious details pertaining to compromising information Russia is alleged to have gathered on Trump.

Page has stated he will file a lawsuit asserting that he had been improperly surveilled, although the warrant had been obtained through proper channels. He has also laughably compared himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. as an unjust target for surveillance. While claiming that the FBI acted out of political motivation, he hasn’t explained why he in particular would be singled out among several Trump campaign officials, or referenced how he had identified as a contact for a Russian undercover agent as early as 2013. He claimed in that case that he had been unaware of the spy’s true nature.

Page’s new testimony reveals that he also told Trump staffers at the highest level – Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks – about his contacts with Russian officials. The Trump campaign has denied knowing that anybody in their campaign was in contact with Russian officials, as Rachel Maddow notes.

Watch:

Page also floated the idea of Donald Trump taking his place, The Hill reports:

In an email to J.D. Gordon, who was then running the campaign’s foreign policy advisory team, and Walid Phares, another foreign policy advisor on the campaign, Page suggested that then-candidate Trump could take a trip that he had scheduled to Moscow in his place.

“I got another idea,” Page wrote, according to an email read out by the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.). “If [Trump would] like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him.”

CNN reports:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVdgGSbaTOI

Here’s the full transcript, if you’ve got time to read 243 pages:

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