re: Carter Page met with and passed documents to RIS

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Two years before joining the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, New York business consultant Carter Page was targeted for recruitment as an intelligence source by Russian spies promising favors for business opportunities in Russia, according to a sealed FBI complaint.

Page confirmed to ABC News that he is the individual identified at "Male-1" in a 2015 court document submitted in a case involving the Russian spies.

Page told ABC News he cooperated in the case, and felt the Feds "unmasked" him by describing him in a manner that would be known to energy insiders.

"I didn't want to be a spy," he said in an interview early Monday afternoon. "I'm not a spy."

According to the document, the FBI interviewed Page as part of the investigation stemming from the indictment of three Russian men identified as agents of the Russian overseas intelligence agency, the SVR.. One of them, Evgeny Buryakov, was operating undercover as an executive in the New York office of a Russian development bank. The Buryakov case resurfaced in headlines last week when President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner revealed he had met with the head of the same bank. Buryakov was sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea agreement, but he was released from prison over the weekend and is awaiting deportation to Russia.

In the FBI court filings, spy recruiters were overheard speaking with Buryakov about “the attempted use of Male-1 as an intelligence source for Russia,” the court record says. The recruiter says he “promised Male-1 a lot” and told him he would use his “connections in Russia” to “push contracts” his way. “For now, his enthusiasm works for me,” the recruiter says of Page.

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