Trump aide's 'Russia ties' alleged in secret US documents

The FBI believed that a former Trump campaign advisor had ties to Russia as it sought to influence the 2016 US presidential election, top secret documents released to US news organizations revealed on Saturday.

The October, 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court named Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor to the campaign of Donald Trump, according to the documents which The New York Times published.

The newspaper, along with USA Today and others, filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain the material, which the Justice Department released but with many details redacted.

"The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government," the initial FBI application says before it is blacked out and continues: "undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in violation of US criminal law."

Release of the documents comes just over one week after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, probing possible collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia, indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers, accusing them of hacking Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton's campaign to steal documents, which were then publicly released.

The surveillance of Page became in February the subject of intense rivalry between Republican and Democratic lawmakers.