The revelations amount to pretty "thin gruel," Jim Kavanagh, editor at the The Polemicist, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear.
The FBI believed Carter Page was in contact with officials of the Russian government and may have been acting on their behalf, an argument which enabled the bureau to secure a warrant to surveil him through the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. Page, a volunteer for the campaign, had his phone tapped as a result.
"What you're really seeing here is the whole… FISA court itself, what a rubber stamp it is. It's easier to get a warrant from a FISA court than it is even to get an indictment, which you can get for a ham sandwich from a prosecutor," Kavanagh told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker. "So really it's very thin gruel. The only evidence they have against him, that I could see, that wasn't blacked out, was the Steele dossier and news reports."
"That represents, I would say, a grave danger and a chilling headwind for people who engage in political speech; for people who may have a different point of view from the consensus of the US empire or the neoconservative establishment," Becker said.
"We have to laugh," investigative journalist Lucy Komisar told Loud & Clear about the FISA warrant against Carter Page. She added that part of the reasoning for granting it was that "Russians have a history of interfering in other countries and in their elections," and that Carter Page was maintaining business contacts with people in Russia.
"If you want to go back to post-World War II, when the Americans interfered in the Italian election, the US government has conducted about 81 electoral interventions in other countries; the Russians did about 36," Komisar asserted.
"And what about overthrowing governments?" she asked. "Iraq, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, Chile. And what about [former top US diplomat] Victoria Nuland? We heard her on the cellphone talking about how they were going to put their guy into the Ukraine."
"The worst thing is the media taking this seriously," Komisar said. "There isn't any evidence. There's nothing there. There's no there there," she said, adding that the heavily redacted report was blacked out in order to give the impression that the government has some kind of knowledge that they can't release.