RUSSIAN PROBE | Schiff: Adviser’s testimony gives insight on efforts

WASHINGTON (AP) — The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee says testimony from a former foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign gives new insight into Russian efforts to influence Trump’s operation.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, California Rep. Adam Schiff said “more and more pictures of the puzzle” were coming together after testimony from Carter Page, the former foreign policy adviser, and a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, another foreign policy adviser to Trump’s Republican campaign.

Page, an unpaid adviser who left the campaign before Trump was elected, acknowledged in closed-door testimony to Congress last week that he had contact with a high-level Russian official while in Russia last year, according to a transcript released Monday. He told the House intelligence panel that he “briefly said hello” to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich when he traveled to Russia for a speech.

Under repeated questions about the contact — which he had at times denied in the past — Page said he had spoken to Dvorkovich after his July 2016 speech at Moscow’s New Economic School.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference. Court documents unsealed last week reference a professor who told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of emails.

“You have these two efforts in parallel going on with two of these advisers,” Schiff said. “You have them both reporting back to the campaign. ... I hardly think that these are coincidental.”

Page called his words with Dvorkovich a “brief interaction,” but Schiff and other Democrats on the panel were skeptical.

According to the transcript, Schiff produced a campaign email during the questioning in which Page had written to other Trump advisers that Dvorkovich had told him “in a private conversation” that he had expressed support for Trump and the desire to work together. Page responded that the conversation had been less than 10 seconds long.

The testimony was part of the House committee’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether it is linked to Trump’s campaign. Page’s trip raised questions just as the FBI began its counterintelligence investigation into the Russian meddling, and he has offered contradictory accounts about whom he met there — at one point telling the AP that he hadn’t met with Dvorkovich. But his testimony on Thursday was under oath.