Carter Page sued fired FBI Director James Comey, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, the FBI, and others involved in the improper Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act snooping on the former Trump campaign associate that relied upon British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier to obtain approval from the FISA court.
Page filed the 59-page complaint with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, with his lawyers saying that he “seeks relief herein for Defendants’ multiple violations of his Constitutional and other legal rights in connection with unlawful surveillance and investigation of him by the United States Government.”
The lawsuit was filed against Comey, McCabe, the bureau, the Justice Department, fired FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, former supervisory special agent Joseph Pientka, FBI agent Stephen Somma, and supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, with Page condemning the “unjustified and illegal actions” and “unlawful spying” and arguing that the court should award him “compensatory and special damages” for no less than $75 million.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report on FISA abuse concluded that the FBI’s investigation was filled with serious missteps and concealed exculpatory information from the FISA court. Horowitz criticized the bureau for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” discovered in the Page FISA applications spanning from fall 2016 to summer 2017. The FISA filings relied upon a salacious, unverified, and now-discredited dossier compiled by Steele, who’d been hired by Fusion GPS, which in turn was hired by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
Page was never charged with any wrongdoing.
“The more fundamental problem was that the FBI was so intent on obtaining a FISA warrant to enable it to spy on the Trump campaign that it did not fully and accurately disclose to the FISC the evidence it had obtained as to whether Dr. Page was a Russian agent. To persuade the FISC that there was probable cause to believe that Dr. Page was a Russian agent, the Defendants provided false or misleading information to the FISC,” Page’s lawyers told the court on Friday, adding, “The individual Defendants fabricated or intentionally disregarded critical evidence, and misled the FISC, in order to obtain the FISA warrants. This case is about holding accountable the entities and individuals who are responsible for the most egregious violation and abuse of the FISA statute since it was enacted over forty years ago.”
Page’s lawyers pointed to recent comments made by McCabe before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I was shocked and disappointed at the errors and mistakes that the OIG found. To me, any material misrepresentation or error in a FISA application is unacceptable, period,” McCabe said earlier in November. “The FBI should be held to the standard of scrupulous accuracy that the [FISA] court demands.”
McCabe said that “we are all responsible for the work that went into that FISA.”
McCabe and Comey pushed to include allegations from Steele’s dossier in the 2017 intelligence community assessment. The dossier was summarized in a classified appendix to the Russia interference assessment.
Horowitz said that FBI interviews with Steele’s main source, revealed to be U.S.-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest and most salacious claims. Declassified footnotes showed that the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, who called the FISA findings “utterly unacceptable” during House testimony this year, concurred with the DOJ’s conclusions that at least two of the four FISA warrants against Page amounted to illegal surveillance. Wray said the bureau was working to “claw back” any intelligence gleaned through the Page FISAs.
A total of four FISA applications and renewals against Page were signed off on by FBI and DOJ leadership and approved by the FISA court.
Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates greenlighted the initial October 2016 FISA application as well as the January 2017 FISA warrant renewal. Comey signed the April 2017 FISA renewal for the FBI. The DOJ’s signatory that time was Dana Boente, who was the acting attorney general following Yates’s firing in late January 2017 and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from Russia-related investigative matters.
McCabe approved the fourth and final FISA warrant for the FBI in June 2017 after Comey was fired that May. Horowitz condemned Comey for leaking the contents from his so-called Comey Memos to spark a special counsel, and McCabe himself was fired in March 2018 after Horowitz concluded he “lacked candor” with investigators.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whose memo on Comey was used by President Trump to justify Comey’s firing and who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017, signed off on the June 2017 FISA request for the DOJ.
McCabe, Rosenstein, and Yates testified earlier in 2020 that they would not have signed off on the FISA warrants against Page if they knew then what they know now. Comey testified that he would not have signed off on the FISA applications without a “much fuller” discussion.
Strzok, Page, and Pientka were all key members of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Horowitz said Somma was “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions in the FISA applications,” and Auten reportedly played a role in assessing Steele’s sources.
U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation, and his inquiry has led to one guilty plea, with Kevin Clinesmith admitting he fraudulently changed the wording of a CIA email to say that Page was “not a source” for the agency, even though the FBI was told that Page had been an “operational contact” for the CIA for years.
Mueller released a report in 2019 concluding that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
