In response to highly dubious civil lawsuits, the Trump Justice Department has been exceedingly generous lately, agreeing to lucrative settlements with plaintiffs who are politically aligned with the White House. For example, the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter fatally shot by a police officer during the attack, received roughly $5 million in taxpayer money last year.
The list has been growing since. Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn was recently awarded $1.25 million in a similarly dubious civil suit, and Mark Houck, a longtime anti-abortion activist, received $1.1 million in a settlement of his own. Even Donald Trump himself is in settlement talks in his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
One had to wonder who might be next, though few might have guessed who the latest addition to the list would be. Politico reported:
The Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle claims from 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that the FBI and Justice Department illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance, according to a court filing and a person familiar with the deal.
Page sued the federal government — along with top FBI and Justice Department officials — in 2020, saying they abused their foreign intelligence surveillance authorities after his travel to Russia drew the eye of the FBI and fueled investigations of then-candidate Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.
As a New York Times report summarized, “There is no dispute that the F.B.I. significantly botched its applications for four rounds of court orders authorizing surveillance of Mr. Page’s phone calls and emails between late 2016 and mid-2017. … But whether Mr. Page had a legal right to compensation from taxpayers was in doubt.”
It might seem like ancient history, but in 2013, Carter described himself in writing as an adviser to the Kremlin, and then three years later, Page joined the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, despite having no apparent qualifications for the job.
As Russia took steps to help Trump’s candidacy, Page traveled to Russia as a member of the Republican’s campaign team, which naturally caught the eye of federal investigators.
After the 2016 election, Republican officials nevertheless condemned the scrutiny, as did Page, who filed a civil suit. The former Kremlin and Trump adviser will now walk away with $1.25 million in taxpayer money, although as Politico’s report noted, the settlement “does not resolve Page’s effort to revive his claims against a slew of former government officials he named as defendants,” including former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
As for who might be the next beneficiary of the Justice Department’s largesse, watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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