

(In 2013, an agent from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, SVR, met Page in New York City and engaged in several communications with him as part of a recruitment attempt.) Known to be sympathetic to the Kremlin, Page was apparently viewed by the Russian security services as a key object for advancing their interests with Trump. Page reportedly indicated that Trump, if elected president, would lift sanctions.
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As a quid pro quo, Sechin was said to have offered Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft, which was due to be privatized. The two had allegedly discussed bilateral energy cooperation between the United States and Russia, along with the lifting of Ukraine-related economic sanctions against Russia. Steele wrote in his dossier that “a Russian source close to Rosneft President Igor Sechin” had confided details of a secret July 2016 meeting in Moscow between Sechin and Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. “Erovinkin was known as 'the keeper of the Kremlin’s secrets.'” More importantly, in terms of allegations made by the Steele dossier and currently the focus of multiple investigations in Washington, Erovinkin was in a position to keep track of contacts with Trump advisers in considerable detail. (Sechin once said he felt thwarted by U.S.-imposed sanctions that kept him from riding motorcycles in America with his friend Tillerson.) Those included the former head of ExxonMobil, now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.


Erovinkin, as chief administrator at Rosneft, was Sechin’s right-hand man and must have known everything about Sechin’s contacts with Americans. Of all the officials who serve under Putin, Sechin is the most powerful. (He was known as “the keeper of the Kremlin’s secrets.”) He then served under Igor Sechin when the latter was deputy premier and subsequently followed Sechin to Rosneft in 2012, after Sechin became CEO of the state oil giant. Life News, known to be a Kremlin mouthpiece, first claimed on its website that Erovinkin had been “killed,” but then quickly changed its story, saying simply that Erovinkin had “died.” FSB investigators were called immediately to the death scene, and news outlets soon reported that Erovinkin had succumbed to a heart attack. There was no more official Russian mention of him.Įrovinkin, who joined the KGB (the FSB’s predecessor) in 1976, had in the mid-1990s worked in the Russian Presidential Administration, where his job was to monitor compliance with security procedures. 26, 2016, Erovinkin, age 61, was found dead in his car in central Moscow. Oleg Erovinkin of Russia’s State Security Service (FSB). In fact, there is evidence that at least one Russian was murdered because of Steele’s revelations: Gen. In his subsequent November testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, which was made available last Thursday, Simpson denied knowing specific cases of people being killed because of the dossier, but he then noted cryptically that “people literally risked their lives to tell us some of this stuff.” Responding for him, Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, blurted out a surprising warning: “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.” The dossier on Donald Trump compiled by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele-which made headlines for its salacious, unconfirmed passage about Trump and some hookers performing for him in a Moscow hotel room-has been denounced by the president’s people as fake news, of course.īut the document was a mixed collection of information and allegations far more precise than the rumors about compromising sexual activities, and some of what’s in it may have unnerved not only Trump, but the Kremlin, where the hunt for leakers can take a fatal turn.ĭuring his recently released August 2017 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Glenn Simpson was asked about sources for the sensational dossier, which Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS, commissioned.
