Carter Page, the former campaign aide to Donald Trump who was spied on by the FBI under false pretenses of Russian collusion, has suffered another setback in his efforts to clear his name.
A Delaware judge has thrown out a defamation lawsuit Page brought against Yahoo News and other media outlets that he says helped spread false innuendo from the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, the Associated Press reports.
The FBI spied on Page using powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as part of its investigation of debunked collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — a probe known as Crossfire Hurricane — using an infamous dossier funded by Hillary Clinton as evidence.
Page was never charged with wrongdoing, and Robert Mueller’s subsequent probe eventually came up empty, but that was cold comfort to Page after getting smeared in the press as a Russian agent and spied on without a warrant.
Page: My life was “shattered”
A lawsuit that Page filed in July recalls how his life was “shattered” as a result of “being falsely branded as a traitor” by Oath Inc., the parent company of Yahoo and the former owner of HuffPost, as Fox News reports. But a judge dismissed the case last week.
At issue were 11 articles, 10 from HuffPost, and an infamous September 2016 piece by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff that was one of the first to mention the dossier.
Judge Craig Karsnitz dismissed Page’s complaint, calling his characterization of the Isikoff piece “either sophistry or political spin,” according to the AP. The judge argued that the article was not unfairly presented as reliable, despite referring to the dossier as an “intelligence report” from a “well-placed” source.
Over the years, Page would become one of the most high-profile victims of FBI misconduct in the Russia hoax that shadowed Trump’s presidency, as it came to the light that the FBI was aware that the Steele dossier was unreliable but withheld such exculpatory information to spy on Page anyway.
He’s still fighting to get his life back
The FBI actually cited Isikoff to corroborate the Steele dossier and justify spying on Page, even though Steele was also Isikoff’s source, as Fox News reported.
Page has been filing lawsuits against these same media companies without success for years, reports note, and in November he sued the Justice Department, FBI, and former FBI Director James Comey for $75 million, according to Fox.
A former FBI lawyer who changed an email to frame Page, Kevin Clinesmith, was recently sentenced to a year of probation.
Then-President Trump pardoned others who had their lives turned upside down by the Russia “witch hunt” before leaving office, including Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, but it remains far from certain that Americans will ever see justice done.
The post Judge throws out defamation suit brought by former Trump campaign aide Carter Page first appeared on Conservative Institute.
No comments: