“based upon contacts at the behest of the United States”
At the very least, they were contacts that Page, at the time, was dutifully reporting to a US intelligence agency, which believed his reports to be truthful.
On or about August 17, 2016, in response to the Crossfire Hurricane team’s prior Carter Page name trace request, the Crossfire Hurricane team received a memorandum from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior interactions with Page, including that Page had been approved as an “operational contact” for the other agency from 2008 to 2013. 489 The memorandum also detailed the information that Page had provided to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers. As detailed in Chapters Five and Eight, the Crossfire Hurricane team did not accurately describe to 01 the nature and extent of the information that the FBI received from the other agency, which we found was highly relevant to an evaluation of the FISA request. Additionally, in August 2016, Page made statements to an FBI CHS that, if true, were in tension with the reporting the FBI received subsequently from Steele, alleging that Page was being used as an intermediary by Manafort to conspire with Russia.