On Thursday, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit that had been brought against the FBI and its former director, James Comey, by former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, who was a victim of the FBI’s abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court during the 2016 presidential election.
As reported by Just The News, Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled that, although “Page alleges that the individual defendants violated §§ 1809(a) and 1810 both by unlawfully engaging in electronic surveillance and using or disclosing the fruits of that surveillance…each defendant claims that Page fails to sufficiently allege that he or she violated the statute.”
“The Court finds that the claims are not time-barred but that Page does not state a claim against any of the individual defendants,” Friedrich continued. “Some of the defendants, such as Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, allegedly approved, encouraged, and facilitated Page’s investigation and the warrant applications. Absent from the complaint is any claim that these four defendants participated in drafting or substantively reviewing the faulty applications themselves, let alone that they performed the FISA surveillance and acquired Page’s communications.”
The surveillance of Carter Page, which was ultimately ordered and carried out by a number of shady characters such as the ones listed by Judge Friedrich, marked perhaps the very first step in the lengthy “Russian collusion” hoax that was perpetuated against the Trump campaign and the subsequent Trump Administration, despite there being no proof of any such collusion. When the FBI sought a surveillance warrant against Page, it was determined by an inspector general’s report in 2019 that the agents responsible hid exculpatory evidence against him in order to have the warrant approved by the FISA court.
“If proven, these allegations clearly demonstrate wrongdoing… but Page does not allege that any of the individual defendants, including the unknown John Doe defendants and those most responsible for the applications’ critical errors, took part in obtaining the surveillance information, either by setting up the devices or gathering or listening to Page’s communications,” Friedrich added.
“Thus, the Court cannot plausibly infer from this complaint that any of the individual defendants, known or unknown, ‘engaged in electronic surveillance,’ in violation of §§ 1809(a) and 1810.,” the judge concluded, thus ending the case.