Carter Page called for a law to “get some reparations for all of the lives that have been ruined” by the Justice Department and FBI, comparing his plight to that of Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II.
Page, the former Trump campaign associate targeted by deeply flawed secretive electronic monitoring through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2016 and 2017, received a standing ovation from the hundreds of attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Wednesday evening.
Page repeatedly called upon Congress to pass what he dubbed the Civil Liberties Act of 2020 while accepting the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Hero of Activism award.
During his interview on stage with Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times, the former Trump foreign policy adviser and energy investor said the “real hero” was President Trump for “surviving and fighting back for so many years.”
In describing the honoree, Scarborough said, “Carter has become the face of FBI wiretap abuse of an American.”
In Page’s remarks, he referenced the infamous Korematsu v. United States Supreme Court decision in 1944 as well as the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 signed by President Reagan. The text of that law acknowledged the “fundamental injustice” of the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, “apologized on behalf of the American people” for it, and provided up to $20,000 per eligible victim.
Page said that “there were reparations for Japanese Americans who had their civil liberties taken from them in World War II. … I’m calling on Congress to have a Civil Liberties Act of 2020 to get some reparations for all of the lives that have been ruined.”
He returned to the theme repeatedly, saying that FISA needed “systematic” reform and that lawmakers need to start “making amends and fighting for reparations … going all the way up to President Trump,” and that “Congress and the American people need to stand up … to start righting these wrongs and finding reparations.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was flawed. The watchdog criticized the DOJ and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Page surveillance.
British ex-Spy Christopher Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through Democratic powerhouse attorney Marc Elias and the Perkins Coie law firm.
Page called Steele a “foreign spy” who was paid “through a series of intermediaries … whether it was Fusion GPS or the DNC,” which he called a “network,” “web,” and “racket.”
“The story is largely about election interference … and this was really part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Page alleged, adding that “the Democrats actually pushed it.”
Fiona Hill, the former Russia expert on the National Security Council and a Ukraine impeachment witness, testified last fall that Steele’s dossier was a “rabbit hole” that “very likely” contained Russian disinformation and that Steele “could have been played” by the Russians.
Following Horowitz’s report, the DOJ told the FISA court it believed the final two Page FISA warrants were “not valid.“ The FBI told the court it planned to “sequester” all the information obtained through the Page FISAs.
The report noted that FBI meetings with Steele’s sources “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting,” and bureau officials said Steele “may have some judgment problems.” The CIA referred to Steele’s dossier as “internet rumor.”
Horowitz said the FBI concluded that “much of the material” in the dossier “could not be corroborated,” adding that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent” with evidence gathered by the FBI and the “limited information that was corroborated” was often “publicly available.”
Steele’s dossier alleged there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report stated, “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Page, who was never charged with wrongdoing, said that the FBI and Mueller “kept trying and trying … to trip me up in a perjury trap” and that “they sent spies against me.”
He referred to the “Mueller dossier” and “Horowitz dossier” and claimed the information in those reports was “really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Page said that “to restore our democracy in 2020, we really need to set the record straight” and said that he has been working on a book because “with all these false dossiers out there, I want to get the whole truth out about what happened.”
His book, Abuse and Power: How an Innocent American Was Framed in an Attempted Coup Against the President, is due out later this year.
