WASHINGTON — Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page told congressional investigators that he spoke privately with Russia’s deputy prime minister and several legislators during a campaign-approved trip to Moscow in July 2016, the latest member of the Trump team to belatedly acknowledge contacts with Russian officials last year.

During closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last week, Page contradicted his previous public denials of any meetings with Russian officials. He also urged the campaign to send President Donald Trump to Moscow instead of him, according to an email obtained by the committee.

Page became at least the ninth member of Trump’s campaign team or White House staff to confirm direct contact with senior officials in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government during the 2016 campaign or during the transition.

Special counsel Robert Mueller and several congressional committees are investigating whether those meetings and communications illegally aided Moscow’s attempts to interfere with the U.S. election campaign.

Page, a Manhattan-based energy consultant, was unknown to foreign policy veterans in Washington when Trump, then a presidential candidate, named him to a small team of foreign policy advisers in March 2016.

After his visit to Moscow that July, Page reported to campaign officials in an email that he had received “incredible insights and outreach” from his discussions with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, from members of the Russian legislature, known as the Duma, and from “senior members” of Putin’s government.

“In a private conversation Dvorkovich expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems,” Page wrote in another email obtained by the committee.

In his testimony, Page denied that his conversations were substantive, insisting that he met only briefly with Dvorkovich before they each spoke to graduates at an academic institution in Moscow.

An executive from Russia’s largest oil company, Andrey Baranov, attended the speech and may have expressed Moscow’s desire to see U.S. sanctions on Russia lifted, Page said. The sanctions were imposed by the Obama administration in 2014 after Russian forces intervened in neighboring Ukraine and seized the Crimean peninsula.

Page denied discussing the matter in depth with Baranov, who works with Rosneft, which is majority-owned by the Russian government. “He may have mentioned it to me. I had no discussions,” Page told the committee, according to a transcript of his testimony released Monday.

Page said he had solicited advice from other campaign aides about what to say in his Moscow speech and said that his trip wasn’t a secret.

“If (Trump would) like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him,” he wrote to senior campaign official J.D. Gordon and another campaign aide in a May 16, 2016, email turned over to the House committee.

Gordon said in a statement that he discouraged Page from making the speech in Moscow.

At a dinner on Capitol Hill, Page told then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, the campaign’s top foreign policy adviser and now U.S. attorney general, and Sam Clovis, another senior campaign official, about his plans to travel to Moscow. Page said he also spoke to Clovis about the trip after he returned.

Clovis withdrew his name from the running for a top position at the Agriculture Department last week after court papers showed he encouraged a junior aide, George Papadopoulos, to visit Moscow if possible.

Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians last year.

david.cloud@latimes.com