DEPENDS WHAT THE MEANING OF MEETING IS...:

Carter Page, a former campaign adviser to President Trump, stumbled through an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Friday night, admitting to having met with a Russian official after previously denying it. As Trump's team faces increasing scrutiny over ties to Russia, Page admitted to meeting with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak but downplayed the significance of it, at one point questioning the meaning of the word "meeting." "Anderson, a great analogy is you and I were members of the same health club here in New York previously. And I remember walking by you even though we didn't know each other and I said, 'Hi, Anderson,' and you said hello and we, you know, a nice little exchange for half a second. Now, does that to you constitute a meeting?"

One source suggested to me that Richard Burt, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, START treaty negotiator, and longtime lobbyist for Alfa Bank, was the nexus. It was Burt who helped draft Trump's foreign policy speech in April, and had been advising the Trump campaign, via Senator Jeff Sessions, on foreign policy. But when I met Burt at his office at the McLarty Associates lobbying shop, he looked at me and said he had never even met him. "The only person I talked to about Carter Page is this guy at the Washington Post," Burt told me. "And I told him I'd never met the guy. Let me put it this way: if I have met him, I've forgotten. He's the former Merrill Lynch guy, right?"

Someone else told me that the Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions' chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump's Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page. But Dearborn wouldn't return my calls, and someone who once worked for that policy shop told me it was neither Dearborn nor Burt, but campaign co-chair Sam Clovis who recruited Page. "If he was part of that original group of people, I can say with 70 percent confidence it was Sam Clovis," this person told me.

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