Former 2016 Trump Campaign aide Carter Page has filed an eight-count complaint against the Department of Justice, the FBI, former FBI Director James Comey and others.
Filed in the DC District Court, Page seeks at least $75 million in damages over, amongst other things, obtaining four illegal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against him.
More via The Federalist‘s Margot Cleveland:
Page’s 59-page complaint lists as defendants a veritable “Who’s Who” of the SpyGate scandal, including former FBI Director James Comey, Assistant Director Andrew McCabe, and the disgraced team of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Also singled out were Kevin Clinessmith, who earlier this year pleaded guilty to falsifying an email to hide Page’s past service as a source to the CIA, and FBI Agents Joe Pientka, Stephen Somma, and Brian Auten, with additional defendants identified merely as John Doe 1 – 10 and Jane Doe 1 – 10.
The first four counts of his complaint allege claims under FISA, with one count seeking damages for each of the four FISA court orders the defendants obtained against Page. FISA provides a private right of action to allow “an aggrieved person. . . who has been subjected to an electronic surveillance or about whom information obtained by electronic surveillance of such person has been disclosed,” to sue those responsible.
While Page’s attorneys are filing a civil claim under FISA, the filing notes that the same act makes it a criminal offense to illegally “engage in electronic surveillance under color of law.”
Page also claims that the United States government is responsible for civil wrongs “in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances,” a Federal tort claim which allows Page to sue the government for wrongful conduct, as if it were a private person.
Meanwhile (thanks to expert analysis by Cleveland – a lawyer and CPA), Page alleges a Bivens claim, named after a Supreme Court case in which a plaintiff was determined to be entitled to damages from the individual government actors responsible for violating their Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure – “which describes precisely what the Crossfire Hurricane team did in submitting the four false and misleading FISA applications to the FISA court.”
Lastly, Page seeks justice in a pair of complaints under the federal Privacy Act – the first of which seeks to force the DOJ to update his “individual records,” and the second which seeks an injunction to force the government to do so – as he says “he was falsely portrayed as a traitor to his country.”
