Once his placement and access was lost, he was free to go.
After naming Mueller special counsel, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein penned two secret memoranda detailing Mueller’s powers and focus. Rosenstein told him he "had been authorized since his appointment to investigate allegations that three Trump campaign officials ‐ Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos ‐ ’committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.’" Page was not just tagged as an explicit target of Mueller’s probe; he was first on the list. Given what soon befell Manafort and Papadopoulos, one might have expected Page to be wearing the new black. And yet, not only is Carter Page a free man, Mueller never even managed to get him on an overdue parking ticket. The question isn’t so much what happened as what didn’t.
Poor form, arresting your own sources. Who knows what they may say in their own defense.
If anyone should have been prosecutable, it should have been Page ‐ if he had committed any crime, that is. For starters, the FBI had Page under surveillance and all of his communications in their possession for a full year. How many political players could survive such colonoscopic scrutiny?
Add to this that Page behaved in ways that would have made it easy for any aggressive prosecutor to go after him. He allowed himself to be interviewed by the FBI repeatedly. He testified before a grand jury. He not only raised red flags, he waved them: Having been excoriated for his July 2016 trip to Moscow, where he gave a Putin-friendly speech, he went back to Moscow in December and tried to drum up some business. He appeared before Congress and made bold claims under oath.
Consider his opening statement before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017: "Whereas I have never done anything wrong in Russia, no documents, records, electronically stored information including email, communication, recordings, data and tangible things could reasonably lead to the discovery of any facts within the investigation’s publicly announced parameters as it relates to actions by the Russian government." If Mueller had anything at all on Page, nothing would have been easier than to add a lying-to-Congress charge to the indictment.
Hey, I reported all my foreign travel and contacts. I provided you copies, remember? I have no intention of losing my clearance.
Nor is Page the sort of evil genius who would be needed to outwit some of the DOJ’s top lawyers. Read the transcript of Page’s House testimony and you’ll be struck by the witness’s odd and awkward responses. Trying to be his own lawyer, he keeps making legalistic distinctions, such as whether his contact with someone had been a "meeting" or a "greeting." Page makes the mistake of talking about being careful rather than actually being careful. Being a careful deponent is rather like being a pilot with the right stuff. If you talk about having the right stuff, you don’t have it; if you testify that you’re being cautious with your answers, you’re not being nearly careful enough.
The perfect beltway-insider 'wannabe' source. Hey watta ya want me to do ....."wear a wire."
Even the Republican members quickly lost patience with Page: "You seem to draw a distinction between a meeting, a greeting, a conversation, and you hearing a speech," said Representative Trey Gowdy. "So to the extent you may have said that you have met with senior members of Russian Government or legislators in Russia, were those meetings, greetings, conversations, or were you sitting in the audience listening?"
Gowdy was referring not only to Page’s reliance on inconsequential legalisms, but also to his unfortunate habit of self-puffery. Page would take information he heard in a speech and present it to the Trump campaign as though he had learned it in a private conversation. For example, as Mueller puts it, "In communications with Campaign officials, Page also repeatedly touted his high-level contacts in Russia and his ability to forge connections between candidate Trump and senior Russian governmental officials." Talk up your "high-level contacts in Russia" enough and people might just start to suspect that you’re a little too tight with Russian officials. Well, that, or a certain sort of political operative might get the idea to spread suspicion about you.
I find the term 'useful idiot' comes to mind.
Page was in a bad enough position: Abandoned and shunned by Team Trump and annoying to Capitol Hill Republicans, Page was short on allies to help him contend with the Mueller squad. So what did he do? He painted a prosecutorial target on his back by refusing to accept Mueller’s enterprise as legitimate. Loudly and relentlessly he declared that the entire investigation was the outgrowth of a fraud perpetrated by Clinton operatives. Page demanded that what he calls the "dodgy dossier" itself be investigated.
Potentially having only limited knowledge of the extent of the Deep State operation, it is likely Page at some point, had a 'woke' moment.