Left: In this Nov. 2, 2017, photo, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump”s 2016 presidential campaign, speaks with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Page, who was the target of a secret surveillance warrant during the FBI’s Russia investigation says in a federal lawsuit filed Friday, Nov. 27, 2020, that he was the victim of “unlawful spying.” (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Right: Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey laughs while addressing a gathering at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics’ JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa).
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected former Donald Trump campaign aide Carter Page’s case against ex-FBI Director James Comey and many others, not offering any reasoning at all for turning down the long-running “unlawful surveillance” lawsuit.
Under the high court’s denials, the Monday orders list noted only that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “took no part in the consideration or decision” in Page’s case, citing her “prior judicial service” in the lower Washington, D.C., federal courts.
“The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied,” the court said nonetheless.
In 2020, Page sued Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, among others.
The suit was brought after the DOJ inspector general investigating Crossfire Hurricane issued a criminal referral against Clinesmith. His admitted alteration of an email used to renew a FISA warrant on the former Trump 2016 campaign adviser was a boon for special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the Russia probe, but the guilty plea led to no prison time — and other high-profile prosecutions failed.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year found Page’s claims to be “time-barred,” his attorneys in December insisted “suspicions that he was the target of a secret investigation were not enough to trigger the statute of limitations for his claims.”
“In holding that those suspicions were sufficient, and sufficient as a matter of law, the D.C. Circuit denied him a judicial forum and set a rule that all but guarantees that a person surveilled by the government faces the expiration of the relevant limitations period before he has enough information to survive a motion to dismiss,” the petition said. “That decision was wrong, and this Court should grant the petition to clarify—either on plenary review or through summary reversal—that federal claims alleging illegal surveillance do not accrue based only on a plaintiff’s uninvestigable suspicions of wrongdoing.”
“It cannot be that surveillance claims are too speculative until they are untimely,” Page’s petition added.
Despite that assertion, the Supreme Court saw no need to clarify anything.
