Deripaska, who was at his apartment in New York City for the interview, waived the three agents off of the collusion theory, saying there was no coordination between the Trump team and Kremlin, The Hill reported Monday.
The agents, one of whom Deripaska knew from a previous FBI case, said they believed former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was involved in the conspiracy, an allegation made in the infamous Steele dossier.
“Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious,” Adam Waldman, a former lawyer for Deripaska, told The Hill. “So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false.”
“You are trying to create something out of nothing,” Deripaska told the agents, according to Waldman.
The dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele wrote and Democrats funded, alleges Manafort used Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, to coordinate with Russian operatives to help influence the election.
The FBI and Justice Department used the unverified dossier to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Page, an energy consultant. Page has vehemently denied the allegations in the dossier and says he has never met Manafort.
Deripaska knows Manafort from past business dealings. During the campaign, they were in a dispute over $19 million Deripaska claimed Manafort pilfered from a failed business deal.
The Hill’s report establishes for the first time that the FBI contacted Russian nationals prior to the election about the collusion allegations. It is also an indicator of how they investigated some of the allegations made in the dossier.
Deripaska, an aluminum magnate who has close ties to Vladimir Putin, has a long and complicated history with the U.S. government. In 2006, the State Department blocked him from traveling to...Read More HERE
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