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NY Times - Never charged by the FBI, in 2013and 2015
The businessman, Carter Page, met with one of three Russians who were eventually charged with being undeclared officers with Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the S.V.R. The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page in 2013 as part of an investigation into the spy ring, but decided that he had not known the man was a spy, and the bureau never accused Mr. Page of wrongdoing
In June 2013, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page, who said he had first met Mr. Podobnyy at an energy symposium in New York earlier that year. Mr. Page said that he had exchanged emails with Mr. Podobnyy about the energy business, that they had met in person once to talk about the energy industry, and that he had also given Mr. Podobnyy documents about the energy business.
In his emailed statement, Mr. Page said, “as I explained to federal authorities prior to the January 2015 filing of this case, I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobnyy who then served as a junior attaché at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.”
Mr. Page, who at the time was also teaching a course on energy and politics at New York University, said in his statement that he had given the Russian “nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students.”
Though charged, Mr. Podobnyy and Mr. Sporyshev were protected by diplomatic immunity from arrest and prosecution while in the United States, but Mr. Buryakov, who was working under what is known as “non-official cover,” had entered the United States as a private citizen and did not have diplomatic immunity. Mr. Buryakov was arrested in 2015 and later pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. Last year, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
“Evgeny Buryakov, in the guise of being a legitimate banker, gathered intelligence as an agent of the Russian Federation in New York,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time, said in a statement after Mr. Buryakov’s sentencing.
A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2017, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Ally Was a Focus of Russian Spies in 2013
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