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Article snippet: They were closing in on Carter Page. It was the last day of November, and the onetime adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign was dodging the tourists who clotted the sidewalks around Rockefeller Center and its famous Christmas tree. As Page wove his way through the holiday crowd, he talked about his troubles, raising his voice to be heard above a Salvation Army bell-ringer. “Anybody who knows me knows how ridiculous the whole thing is,” he lamented to me and everyone else within earshot along Fifth Avenue. “But you’re still part of the controversy.” Page was speaking of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspected dealings with Russia during the 2016 election, which had been gathering steam of late. About a month earlier, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was indicted by the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, on charges of tax fraud and money laundering. In the next 24 hours, Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, would plead guilty to lying to the F.B.I. Page, too, had become ensnared in the scandal, albeit more ambiguously. A foreign-policy adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, Page had had an affinity for Russia ever since studying in Moscow as a young Navy midshipman in 1991 and had worked there for three years in the 2000s. He was suspected of meeting with Russian officials during a visit to Moscow in July 2016, and shortly thereafter the F.B.I. obtained a rare warrant to monitor his electronic communications.... Link to the full article to read more