One former Eurasia Group colleague said he was stunned when he discovered Page had mysteriously become one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers. “I nearly dropped my coffee,” he told me. The colleague added: “We had wanted people who could engage in critical analysis of what’s going on. This is a guy who has no critical insight into the situation. He wasn’t a smart person.”

Page’s real qualification for the role, it appeared, had little to do with his restless CV. What appeared to recommend him to Trump was his boundless enthusiasm for Putin and his corresponding loathing of Obama and Clinton. Page’s view of the world was not unlike the Kremlin’s. Boiled down: the United States’ attempts to spread democracy had brought chaos and disaster.

Podobnyy and Sporyshev approached their duties with a certain cynicism laced with boredom and a shot of homesickness, the FBI tapes revealed. Page, by contrast, was the rarest of things: an American who apparently believed that Putin was wise and virtuous and kind.