The Trump administration agreed on Tuesday to pay Carter Page $1.25 million to settle part of his long-running fight over FBI surveillance, according to a filing by Solicitor General D. John Sauer with the Supreme Court. The deal resolves only one slice of Page’s case, and it does not touch his claims against former FBI officials.
Page, who served as an informal foreign-policy adviser to President Trump during the 2016 campaign, had appealed a lower court ruling that threw out his lawsuit against the Justice Department, the FBI and eight named individuals. Those defendants included former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
The settlement covers only a claim Page brought under the PATRIOT Act. It does not apply to his separate claims under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against the ex-FBI officials. Page filed the lawsuit in November 2020 after the FBI used four FISA warrants to electronically surveil him, including one in October 2016 and three more in 2017.
The case grew out of the bureau’s Russia investigation and the surveillance of a man who was never charged with a crime. The Justice Department inspector general later found 17 significant errors and omissions in the FBI’s initial 2016 application and in the three renewal requests, and criticized the bureau’s reliance on opposition research memos prepared by Christopher Steele.
In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson said, “No American should ever face covert and unlawful surveillance based on their political views,” and said the investigation into Carter Page, “a man never charged with a single crime,” relied on flawed and uncorroborated information. The spokesperson called the targeting of American citizens for political purposes a severe violation of civil liberties and said the department is committed to dismantling the weaponization of government.
Page’s lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich in 2022, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed that decision in 2024, ruling that the statute of limitations barred his claims against the federal entities and FBI personnel. The settlement does not undo those rulings. It closes one remaining avenue of the case and leaves the individual-defendant claims outside the deal.
