First Thoughts on Page - Josh Marshall/TPM

[DonViejo]

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 7, 2017 11:49 AM

I was in meetings most of this morning. I’m only now catching up on the reporting on Carter Page’s testimony before Congress. But I did read the first half of his testimony transcript last night. And I wanted to share a few initial impressions.

The first and overwhelming takeaway is that Page is a weird, fairly inscrutable person. I found it difficult to discern whether he has some sort of cognitive deficit causing an inability to focus or whether he was simply trying to kick dust in people’s faces with nonsensical digressions. My one consistent impression is that he thinks he’s a good deal more clever than he is. You could probably guess that by his decision to testify without a lawyer present.

Other oddities were the grandiose throwaway lines about the dodgy dossier (copied from the UK a decade ago), terrorist threats against him, and imitations of Trumpite storylines and verbiage.

A good deal of the first half of his testimony was tied to a convoluted explanation of why he apparently failed to turn over a substantial number of documents he was ordered to turn over to the House committee. (His argument did not sound legally tenable.) Since his claims appeared to be contradicted by his contemporaneous emails he consistently tried to use these over-clever interpretations of his own words. Outreach and conversations with key government leaders became simply talking to the man on the street and watching TV. Also, did you know Page is a scholar? It’s different with scholars. That was perhaps half his argument. The text reads like a guy who thinks he’s being really clever and skating right past people with canny interpretations when he’s clearly just lying and doing so in a position of great legal vulnerability.

Clearly Page, like Papadopoulos, is basically a goof. But like Papadopoulos, I suspect he’s trouble for the Trump inner circle and that there’s a lot more we still don’t know.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/first-thoughts-on-page

[Stuart G]

1. Thanks for posting. k and r.

[lagomorph777]

2. Sweet. This is what Turd gets for surrounding himself with idiots.

[Wellstone ruled]

3. Page seems to be a Wannabe Hanger-Oner.

The Guy seems a ton light between the Ears. Gullible,maybe. Appears to be a useful Idiot and now he will be used for someones useful means to a end.

[Bucky]

4. The characteristics that you list pretty much described Trump's inner circle

[Wellstone ruled]

6. Okay,most seem to all

possess manipulative personal skills. Other than that,useful Idiots .

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. I got the same impression from reading the transcript.

Page obviously thinks he's smarter than everybody else and he slithers and squirms and obfuscates all over the place, but the committee members, especially Adam Schiff (and even Trey Gowdy) are way ahead of him. He doesn't seem to have figured this out, though. He was relentlessly and hilarously self-aggrandizing and paranoid at the same time. He's not really a player, but he wanted to be one. While he tried to downplay his involvement with the Trump campaign it's clear that he thought so much of himself and his "connections" that he took every opportunity to ingratiate himself with other campaign members, including Sessions, Hope Hicks, Gordon, Lewandowski, and Sam Clovis, all of whom he told about his trip to Russia. He was low-hanging fruit for Russian operatives looking for a patsy. He was probably flattered by the attention paid him by Russian "scholars," almost certainly intelligence agents looking for an easy mark who could be a conduit to the Trump administration.

He's in deep legal shit and hasn't figured that out yet.

[lunatica]

7. He also gets foam in the corners of his mouth when he babbles on and on

[BumRushDaShow]

8. When he was on Chris Hayes' show last week

that is how he came across. Sortof like a smug faux intellectual preppy who thinks all of this is beneath him, so he smiles too much and waves away or dismisses some critical revelations. My gut thoughts were to wonder what drug he was on... But then thinking about it just now, I would not be surprised if he was snorting cocaine.