Left: In this Nov. 2, 2017, photo, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump”s 2016 presidential campaign, speaks with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Page, who was the target of a secret surveillance warrant during the FBI’s Russia investigation says in a federal lawsuit filed Friday, Nov. 27, 2020, that he was the victim of “unlawful spying.” (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Right: Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey laughs while addressing a gathering at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics’ JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa).
The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed the lawsuit brought by former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page against ex-FBI Director James Comey and several others. The court provided no explanation for its decision to reject the case, which centered on allegations of “unlawful surveillance.”
In the list of orders issued on Monday, it was noted that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson abstained from participating in the deliberation or ruling on Page’s case. Her recusal was attributed to her previous judicial role in the lower courts of Washington, D.C.
Despite this, the court simply stated, “The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.”
Page initiated legal action in 2020 against Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI officials Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Kevin Clinesmith, among others.
The suit was brought after the DOJ inspector general investigating Crossfire Hurricane issued a criminal referral against Clinesmith. His admitted alteration of an email used to renew a FISA warrant on the former Trump 2016 campaign adviser was a boon for special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the Russia probe, but the guilty plea led to no prison time — and other high-profile prosecutions failed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had previously determined that Page’s claims were “time-barred.” In response, Page’s legal team argued in December that merely suspecting he was under secret investigation was insufficient to start the clock on the statute of limitations for his claims.
“In holding that those suspicions were sufficient, and sufficient as a matter of law, the D.C. Circuit denied him a judicial forum and set a rule that all but guarantees that a person surveilled by the government faces the expiration of the relevant limitations period before he has enough information to survive a motion to dismiss,” the petition said. “That decision was wrong, and this Court should grant the petition to clarify—either on plenary review or through summary reversal—that federal claims alleging illegal surveillance do not accrue based only on a plaintiff’s uninvestigable suspicions of wrongdoing.”
“It cannot be that surveillance claims are too speculative until they are untimely,” Page’s petition added.
Despite that assertion, the Supreme Court saw no need to clarify anything.