AI
Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:08:04 PM
Appeals court refuses to revive Carter Page lawsuit
----------
"The Inspector General’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Report: A Quick and Dirty Analysis
[...]
We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced Priestap’s decision to open Crossfire Hurricane. The evidence also showed that FBI officials responsible for and involved in the case opening decisions were unanimous in their belief that, together with the July 2016 release by WikiLeaks of hacked DNC emails, the Papadopoulos statement described in the FFG information reflected the Russian government’s potential next step to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. These FBI officials were similarly unanimous in their belief that the FFG information represented a threat to national security that warranted further investigation by the FBI. Witnesses told us that they did not recall observing during these discussions any instances or indications of improper motivations or political bias on the part of the participants, including Strzok.
---
Note an interesting feature of this passage. The investigation was not an investigation of the Trump campaign. It was four investigations of individuals—Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn—associated with the campaign but about whom there was specific reason for concern. In other words, investigators were not spying on the Trump campaign. They had concerns about specific people and their relationship with Russia, just as the FBI has always said.
This, of course, raises the question of whether the FBI had adequate predication for these investigations. What does Horowitz say on this point?
---
We ... concluded that the FBI had sufficient predication to open full counterintelligence investigations of Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, and Manafort in August 2016. The investigation of Papadopoulos was predicated upon his alleged statements in May 2016 to an employee of [an allied foreign government]. According to the opening [electronic communication], Papadopoulos was “identical to the individual who made statements indicating that he is knowledgeable that the Russians made a suggestion to the Trump team that they could assist the Trump campaign with an anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.” The three other cases were predicated on information developed by the Crossfire Hurricane team through law enforcement database and open source searches, conducted to determine which individuals associated with the Trump campaign may have been in a position to have received the alleged offer of assistance from Russia.
---
This brings me to the next key point: The investigation did, in fact, begin when the Australian government communicated to the U.S. information about Papadopoulos’s conversation with the former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, in London:
---
In Crossfire Hurricane, the “articulable factual basis” set forth in the opening EC was the FFG information received from an FBI Legal Attache stating that Papadopoulos had suggested during a meeting in May 2016 with officials from a “trusted foreign partner” that the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist by releasing information damaging to candidate Clinton and President Obama. Additionally, by July 31, 2016, although not specifically mentioned in the EC, the FBI had reason to believe that Russia may have been connected to the WikiLeaks disclosures that occurred earlier in July 2016.
---
The report makes clear that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the predication of the investigation."
----------
That lengthy excerpt from the previous is included here because it is highly relevant to the assertion by Trump, and his defenders, that his campaign was spied upon, for purely political motives, by their conspiracy driven claim of an anti-Trump "Deep State." In fact, on all good evidence so far, the intelligence agencies investigations were, as stated by Wittes above, investigations into the four individuals relationship with Russia. Four individuals who happened also to be working for the Trump campaign.
Return to article.
The former Trump adviser claimed he was a victim of terrorism after media reports linked him to Russian efforts to influence the campaign.
Carter Page. | Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon
By JOSH GERSTEIN
12/02/2019 12:53 PM EST
Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page has struck out again with his lawsuit claiming he was a victim of terrorism in the form of media reports linking him to Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign.
With just a week to go before release of a hotly anticipated Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI’s targeting of Page in a series of surveillance warrants, a federal appeals court made evident Monday that it saw little, if any, merit in Page’s civil suit.
Page claims he faced a series of death threats as a result of stories published by Yahoo News, the Huffington Post and Radio Free Europe in September 2016 about a federal investigation into whether he may have been the focus of Russian attempts to interfere in the presidential race.
However, the three judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals — which included two Trump appointees — ruled that a district court judge acted properly when she tossed out Page’s suit over a series of defects.
“As the district court correctly held, Page failed to allege any facts suggesting that the articles in question were intended to intimidate or coerce civilians, influence government policy, or affect government conduct,” the appeals court wrote in an order. “Page’s conclusory assertions that defamation and propaganda are acts of terrorism are insufficient to plausibly state a claim under the ATA [Anti-Terrorism Act.]”
The judges also said that law doesn’t allow lawsuits against the government. And they concluded that another claim Page leveled at the Agency for Global Media, the new name for the entity overseeing Radio Free Europe, was barred because he failed to inform that outlet he was seeking damages before filing suit.
During an argument session .. http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/4c7defea-6ddd-43ef-a5a4-d44d99a6656f/15/doc/18-2295.mp3 .. last month, Page — a student in a Master’s of Law program — contended that he should be allowed to revise his suit, in part because he filed it without the aid of a lawyer.
However, the appeals judges wrote, it would be “futile” to allow him to try to redraft his complaint.
Asked about the appeals court’s order, Page linked the ruling to the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report and to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant applications the Justice watchdog has been reviewing for more than a year and a half.
“This decision is entirely consistent with DOJ’s complete mismanagement of the one-sided IG report,” the former Trump campaign adviser said. “Like the 4 judges on the FISC and the SDNY judge who led the way to this appellate panel’s decision, they have all been in a race to accept any lies that the arrogant and partisan DOJ bureaucrats throw their way. See no evil, hear no evil, repeat all half-truths. The 2nd Circuit’s preliminary order is far from the end of this story.”
“There’s much more to come,” Page told the judges last month. He said he expects “a million records” to emerge from the IG report that will buttress his case.
During the same argument session, lawyers for the federal government and for Oath, Yahoo’s parent company, urged the appeals court not to allow Page to revive his suit.
“Publication of a news article is simply not an act of international terrorism,” David Parker, an attorney for Oath, said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Cha-Kim described Page’s suit as “meritless for a long list of reasons.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment. Parker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling Monday was issued by 2nd Circuit Judges Amalya Kearse, Richard Sullivan and Michael Park. Kearse was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. Sullivan and Park were both appointed by Trump.
Page is also pursuing a new lawsuit against the Justice Department, alleging that his privacy rights have been repeatedly violated by officials handling various aspects of the Russia probe.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/02/appeals-court-refuses-to-revive-carter-page-lawsuit-074761
Related
Ex-Trump campaign aide Carter Page notches victory after inspector general hammers FBI for surveillance missteps
Carter Page arrives at theU.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on the same day as a hearing regarding Michael Cohen, a longtime personal lawyer and confidant for President Donald Trump, on April 16, 2018 in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
By Devlin Barrett
Dec. 15, 2019 at 9:29 a.m. GMT+11
Carter Page fought the law, and the law lost.
The former Trump campaign adviser was one of the first four suspects identified by the FBI in the early days of its investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign aides, and the only one of that group to have his electronic communications secretly targeted by a U.S. foreign intelligence court. But when the dust settled three years later, he was also the only one of the four without a criminal conviction — a feat all the more remarkable in that he did much of it without a lawyer.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during a relatively brief interview at the White House in early 2017. Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to agents in a separate interview that same month. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded guilty in one case and was convicted in another for a host of financial crimes.
Page, now 48, testified before Congress without a lawyer. He spoke to the FBI for about 10 hours .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-has-questioned-trump-campaign-adviser-carter-page-at-length-in-russia-probe/2017/06/26/1a271dcc-5aa5-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_6 .. in March 2017, also without a lawyer. He went on television, repeatedly, to declare his innocence and offer sometimes hard-to-follow explanations for his trips to Moscow and his meetings there.
It was a bold strategy.
“It’s highly unusual and something that we strongly advise against,” said Gary Stein, a former federal prosecutor who is now at the law firm of Schulte Roth & Zabel. “In my view, any interaction with the government, particularly when they’re asking you questions, is fraught with danger, because an untruthful answer could be viewed as a criminal act. So we always think the right course is to have a lawyer in those interactions and to limit the number of statements you make publicly because those are all things that can come back to haunt you.”
[Inspector General details problems with FBI’s Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/inspector-general-michael-horowitz-testimony/2019/12/11/b6632b6c-1ba1-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_11]
Page had declared that the year-long surveillance of his communications was an abuse of government power, and he received a significant measure of vindication last Monday in a 434-page report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
Horowitz concluded that the FBI made 17 significant errors or omissions in its applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Page.
“It doesn’t vindicate anyone at the FBI who touched this, including the leadership,” Horowitz told Congress.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “If I was Mr. Carter Page, I’d hire me a lawyer and I’d sue the hell out of the United States.”
Acting as his own attorney, Page has already sued the government, claiming that news stories about the investigation made him a victim of terrorism, but a judge rejected that argument. [And appeal rejected, see above.] He has filed a separate suit alleging violations of the Privacy Act, and his comments since the release of the inspector general report suggest that he intends to keep fighting in court.
He said the report is “a positive initial step, but it is just that,” arguing that the Justice Department needs to change how it handles Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) investigations.
“I am exceptionally grateful to the U.S. Department of Justice as well as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee from both parties who have underscored the importance of fixing this problem. I’m glad that it has become a high national priority,” Page said.
The twists and turns of the Page saga stretch to 2013, when he was caught up in a Russian spy investigation in New York City.
Page, who had worked in Moscow years earlier as an investment banker, met with a Russian official in January 2013 at an energy conference in New York. That official, Victor Podobnyy, was known as a Russian diplomat to the United Nations but was in fact a Russian intelligence agent, according to U.S. officials. In the months that followed, Page provided Podobnyy documents about the energy business. Prosecutors filed charges against the Russian suspects in the case in 2015. Court papers did not identify Page, but he was on the FBI’s radar.
[FBI questioned Carter Page for hours
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-has-questioned-trump-campaign-adviser-carter-page-at-length-in-russia-probe/2017/06/26/1a271dcc-5aa5-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_25]
Then, in March 2016, Trump named Page as one of his foreign policy advisers. The next month, counterintelligence officials opened an investigation of him.
That summer, as the political parties had their nominating conventions, files and emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were released publicly via the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. U.S. intelligence officials had already determined that Russian intelligence hackers had stolen the files; now the Russians appeared to be using them to try to influence the election.
In late July, an Australian diplomat notified the U.S. government that a Trump campaign adviser, Papadopoulos, had suggested before the DNC hacking was known that the Russians were interested in helping the campaign.
That tip led senior FBI officials in Washington to open its investigation of Papadopoulos, and take over the inquiry of Page. As investigators pursued Page, they realized that other agents in the bureau had been sitting on an explosive set of allegations against him made by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who had been hired, via another firm, by the Democrats.
That set of allegations, which became known as the Steele dossier, was used by FBI agents to get approval from a FISA court in October 2016 to secretly monitor Page’s communications. The court-approved surveillance was reauthorized three times, amounting to a year of surveillance. The inspector general found major problems with the assertions the FBI made to the court — relying on damaging accusations that the FBI could not substantiate, and not disclosing exculpatory information.
[FBI obtained FISA warrant on former Trump adviser Carter Page
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_34]
Among the most damning findings in the report was that an FBI lawyer had retroactively altered an email to make it look as though Page was not a source for the CIA, when in fact the agency had told the FBI as early as August 2016 that it had a previous relationship with Page.
The inspector general’s report does not identify the CIA by name, but people familiar with the case said that it was the agency in question. Page announced on television that he had spoken to the CIA in the past, forcing officials to scramble to figure out whether that was true.
To determine whether Page was a secret agent of Russia, the FBI sent a confidential informant to talk to him about his alleged relationship with Manafort. But in that secretly recorded conversation, Page denied knowing Manafort, saying that Manafort wouldn’t even respond to Page’s emails, according to the inspector general’s report.
But the investigation continued. In April 2017, while Page’s calls and emails were still under surveillance, The Washington Post reported .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_40 .. what the FBI had been doing. Page said the activity was “unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” comparing the eavesdropping to secret recordings the FBI and the Justice Department made against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
Rather than hire a lawyer, Page decided to speak out, giving media interviews and asking lawmakers to dig into his case.
“I want to get as much information out there as possible,” he told CNN in April 2017.
Page ultimately hired a lawyer to help him navigate his interviews with prosecutors working for Robert S. Mueller III, but for the most part he remained a one-man, nonlawyer advocate for his cause.
At times, that effort bordered on the comical, such as when reporters spotted him in a Senate office building delivering documents that had been requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Wearing a boyish grin and a bright red bucket hat, Page dropped off his papers, and seemed to enjoy himself as the reporters followed, taking his picture and asking him questions.
Paul Kane contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ex-trump-campaign-aide-carter-page-notches-victory-after-inspector-general-hammers-fbi-for-surveillance-missteps/2019/12/14/6daac5f2-1dda-11ea-b4c1-fd0d91b60d9e_story.html
----------
"The Inspector General’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Report: A Quick and Dirty Analysis
[...]
We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced Priestap’s decision to open Crossfire Hurricane. The evidence also showed that FBI officials responsible for and involved in the case opening decisions were unanimous in their belief that, together with the July 2016 release by WikiLeaks of hacked DNC emails, the Papadopoulos statement described in the FFG information reflected the Russian government’s potential next step to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections. These FBI officials were similarly unanimous in their belief that the FFG information represented a threat to national security that warranted further investigation by the FBI. Witnesses told us that they did not recall observing during these discussions any instances or indications of improper motivations or political bias on the part of the participants, including Strzok.
---
Note an interesting feature of this passage. The investigation was not an investigation of the Trump campaign. It was four investigations of individuals—Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn—associated with the campaign but about whom there was specific reason for concern. In other words, investigators were not spying on the Trump campaign. They had concerns about specific people and their relationship with Russia, just as the FBI has always said.
This, of course, raises the question of whether the FBI had adequate predication for these investigations. What does Horowitz say on this point?
---
We ... concluded that the FBI had sufficient predication to open full counterintelligence investigations of Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, and Manafort in August 2016. The investigation of Papadopoulos was predicated upon his alleged statements in May 2016 to an employee of [an allied foreign government]. According to the opening [electronic communication], Papadopoulos was “identical to the individual who made statements indicating that he is knowledgeable that the Russians made a suggestion to the Trump team that they could assist the Trump campaign with an anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.” The three other cases were predicated on information developed by the Crossfire Hurricane team through law enforcement database and open source searches, conducted to determine which individuals associated with the Trump campaign may have been in a position to have received the alleged offer of assistance from Russia.
---
This brings me to the next key point: The investigation did, in fact, begin when the Australian government communicated to the U.S. information about Papadopoulos’s conversation with the former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, in London:
---
In Crossfire Hurricane, the “articulable factual basis” set forth in the opening EC was the FFG information received from an FBI Legal Attache stating that Papadopoulos had suggested during a meeting in May 2016 with officials from a “trusted foreign partner” that the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist by releasing information damaging to candidate Clinton and President Obama. Additionally, by July 31, 2016, although not specifically mentioned in the EC, the FBI had reason to believe that Russia may have been connected to the WikiLeaks disclosures that occurred earlier in July 2016.
---
The report makes clear that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the predication of the investigation."
----------
That lengthy excerpt from the previous is included here because it is highly relevant to the assertion by Trump, and his defenders, that his campaign was spied upon, for purely political motives, by their conspiracy driven claim of an anti-Trump "Deep State." In fact, on all good evidence so far, the intelligence agencies investigations were, as stated by Wittes above, investigations into the four individuals relationship with Russia. Four individuals who happened also to be working for the Trump campaign.
Return to article.
The former Trump adviser claimed he was a victim of terrorism after media reports linked him to Russian efforts to influence the campaign.
Carter Page. | Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon
By JOSH GERSTEIN
12/02/2019 12:53 PM EST
Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page has struck out again with his lawsuit claiming he was a victim of terrorism in the form of media reports linking him to Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign.
With just a week to go before release of a hotly anticipated Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI’s targeting of Page in a series of surveillance warrants, a federal appeals court made evident Monday that it saw little, if any, merit in Page’s civil suit.
Page claims he faced a series of death threats as a result of stories published by Yahoo News, the Huffington Post and Radio Free Europe in September 2016 about a federal investigation into whether he may have been the focus of Russian attempts to interfere in the presidential race.
However, the three judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals — which included two Trump appointees — ruled that a district court judge acted properly when she tossed out Page’s suit over a series of defects.
“As the district court correctly held, Page failed to allege any facts suggesting that the articles in question were intended to intimidate or coerce civilians, influence government policy, or affect government conduct,” the appeals court wrote in an order. “Page’s conclusory assertions that defamation and propaganda are acts of terrorism are insufficient to plausibly state a claim under the ATA [Anti-Terrorism Act.]”
The judges also said that law doesn’t allow lawsuits against the government. And they concluded that another claim Page leveled at the Agency for Global Media, the new name for the entity overseeing Radio Free Europe, was barred because he failed to inform that outlet he was seeking damages before filing suit.
During an argument session .. http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/4c7defea-6ddd-43ef-a5a4-d44d99a6656f/15/doc/18-2295.mp3 .. last month, Page — a student in a Master’s of Law program — contended that he should be allowed to revise his suit, in part because he filed it without the aid of a lawyer.
However, the appeals judges wrote, it would be “futile” to allow him to try to redraft his complaint.
Asked about the appeals court’s order, Page linked the ruling to the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report and to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant applications the Justice watchdog has been reviewing for more than a year and a half.
“This decision is entirely consistent with DOJ’s complete mismanagement of the one-sided IG report,” the former Trump campaign adviser said. “Like the 4 judges on the FISC and the SDNY judge who led the way to this appellate panel’s decision, they have all been in a race to accept any lies that the arrogant and partisan DOJ bureaucrats throw their way. See no evil, hear no evil, repeat all half-truths. The 2nd Circuit’s preliminary order is far from the end of this story.”
“There’s much more to come,” Page told the judges last month. He said he expects “a million records” to emerge from the IG report that will buttress his case.
During the same argument session, lawyers for the federal government and for Oath, Yahoo’s parent company, urged the appeals court not to allow Page to revive his suit.
“Publication of a news article is simply not an act of international terrorism,” David Parker, an attorney for Oath, said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Cha-Kim described Page’s suit as “meritless for a long list of reasons.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment. Parker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling Monday was issued by 2nd Circuit Judges Amalya Kearse, Richard Sullivan and Michael Park. Kearse was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. Sullivan and Park were both appointed by Trump.
Page is also pursuing a new lawsuit against the Justice Department, alleging that his privacy rights have been repeatedly violated by officials handling various aspects of the Russia probe.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/02/appeals-court-refuses-to-revive-carter-page-lawsuit-074761
Related
Ex-Trump campaign aide Carter Page notches victory after inspector general hammers FBI for surveillance missteps
Carter Page arrives at theU.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on the same day as a hearing regarding Michael Cohen, a longtime personal lawyer and confidant for President Donald Trump, on April 16, 2018 in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
By Devlin Barrett
Dec. 15, 2019 at 9:29 a.m. GMT+11
Carter Page fought the law, and the law lost.
The former Trump campaign adviser was one of the first four suspects identified by the FBI in the early days of its investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign aides, and the only one of that group to have his electronic communications secretly targeted by a U.S. foreign intelligence court. But when the dust settled three years later, he was also the only one of the four without a criminal conviction — a feat all the more remarkable in that he did much of it without a lawyer.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during a relatively brief interview at the White House in early 2017. Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to agents in a separate interview that same month. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded guilty in one case and was convicted in another for a host of financial crimes.
Page, now 48, testified before Congress without a lawyer. He spoke to the FBI for about 10 hours .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-has-questioned-trump-campaign-adviser-carter-page-at-length-in-russia-probe/2017/06/26/1a271dcc-5aa5-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_6 .. in March 2017, also without a lawyer. He went on television, repeatedly, to declare his innocence and offer sometimes hard-to-follow explanations for his trips to Moscow and his meetings there.
It was a bold strategy.
“It’s highly unusual and something that we strongly advise against,” said Gary Stein, a former federal prosecutor who is now at the law firm of Schulte Roth & Zabel. “In my view, any interaction with the government, particularly when they’re asking you questions, is fraught with danger, because an untruthful answer could be viewed as a criminal act. So we always think the right course is to have a lawyer in those interactions and to limit the number of statements you make publicly because those are all things that can come back to haunt you.”
[Inspector General details problems with FBI’s Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/inspector-general-michael-horowitz-testimony/2019/12/11/b6632b6c-1ba1-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_11]
Page had declared that the year-long surveillance of his communications was an abuse of government power, and he received a significant measure of vindication last Monday in a 434-page report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
Horowitz concluded that the FBI made 17 significant errors or omissions in its applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Page.
“It doesn’t vindicate anyone at the FBI who touched this, including the leadership,” Horowitz told Congress.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “If I was Mr. Carter Page, I’d hire me a lawyer and I’d sue the hell out of the United States.”
Acting as his own attorney, Page has already sued the government, claiming that news stories about the investigation made him a victim of terrorism, but a judge rejected that argument. [And appeal rejected, see above.] He has filed a separate suit alleging violations of the Privacy Act, and his comments since the release of the inspector general report suggest that he intends to keep fighting in court.
He said the report is “a positive initial step, but it is just that,” arguing that the Justice Department needs to change how it handles Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) investigations.
“I am exceptionally grateful to the U.S. Department of Justice as well as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee from both parties who have underscored the importance of fixing this problem. I’m glad that it has become a high national priority,” Page said.
The twists and turns of the Page saga stretch to 2013, when he was caught up in a Russian spy investigation in New York City.
Page, who had worked in Moscow years earlier as an investment banker, met with a Russian official in January 2013 at an energy conference in New York. That official, Victor Podobnyy, was known as a Russian diplomat to the United Nations but was in fact a Russian intelligence agent, according to U.S. officials. In the months that followed, Page provided Podobnyy documents about the energy business. Prosecutors filed charges against the Russian suspects in the case in 2015. Court papers did not identify Page, but he was on the FBI’s radar.
[FBI questioned Carter Page for hours
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-has-questioned-trump-campaign-adviser-carter-page-at-length-in-russia-probe/2017/06/26/1a271dcc-5aa5-11e7-a9f6-7c3296387341_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_25]
Then, in March 2016, Trump named Page as one of his foreign policy advisers. The next month, counterintelligence officials opened an investigation of him.
That summer, as the political parties had their nominating conventions, files and emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were released publicly via the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. U.S. intelligence officials had already determined that Russian intelligence hackers had stolen the files; now the Russians appeared to be using them to try to influence the election.
In late July, an Australian diplomat notified the U.S. government that a Trump campaign adviser, Papadopoulos, had suggested before the DNC hacking was known that the Russians were interested in helping the campaign.
That tip led senior FBI officials in Washington to open its investigation of Papadopoulos, and take over the inquiry of Page. As investigators pursued Page, they realized that other agents in the bureau had been sitting on an explosive set of allegations against him made by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who had been hired, via another firm, by the Democrats.
That set of allegations, which became known as the Steele dossier, was used by FBI agents to get approval from a FISA court in October 2016 to secretly monitor Page’s communications. The court-approved surveillance was reauthorized three times, amounting to a year of surveillance. The inspector general found major problems with the assertions the FBI made to the court — relying on damaging accusations that the FBI could not substantiate, and not disclosing exculpatory information.
[FBI obtained FISA warrant on former Trump adviser Carter Page
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?tid=lk_interstitial_manual_34]
Among the most damning findings in the report was that an FBI lawyer had retroactively altered an email to make it look as though Page was not a source for the CIA, when in fact the agency had told the FBI as early as August 2016 that it had a previous relationship with Page.
The inspector general’s report does not identify the CIA by name, but people familiar with the case said that it was the agency in question. Page announced on television that he had spoken to the CIA in the past, forcing officials to scramble to figure out whether that was true.
To determine whether Page was a secret agent of Russia, the FBI sent a confidential informant to talk to him about his alleged relationship with Manafort. But in that secretly recorded conversation, Page denied knowing Manafort, saying that Manafort wouldn’t even respond to Page’s emails, according to the inspector general’s report.
But the investigation continued. In April 2017, while Page’s calls and emails were still under surveillance, The Washington Post reported .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_40 .. what the FBI had been doing. Page said the activity was “unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” comparing the eavesdropping to secret recordings the FBI and the Justice Department made against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
Rather than hire a lawyer, Page decided to speak out, giving media interviews and asking lawmakers to dig into his case.
“I want to get as much information out there as possible,” he told CNN in April 2017.
Page ultimately hired a lawyer to help him navigate his interviews with prosecutors working for Robert S. Mueller III, but for the most part he remained a one-man, nonlawyer advocate for his cause.
At times, that effort bordered on the comical, such as when reporters spotted him in a Senate office building delivering documents that had been requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Wearing a boyish grin and a bright red bucket hat, Page dropped off his papers, and seemed to enjoy himself as the reporters followed, taking his picture and asking him questions.
Paul Kane contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ex-trump-campaign-aide-carter-page-notches-victory-after-inspector-general-hammers-fbi-for-surveillance-missteps/2019/12/14/6daac5f2-1dda-11ea-b4c1-fd0d91b60d9e_story.html
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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