The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Carter Page's appeal seeking to revive his lawsuit against former FBI Director James Comey and other bureau officials over surveillance conducted during the Trump-Russia investigation. The court offered no explanation, as is customary when it turns away petitions. With that single line on an orders list, a five-year legal fight reached its end.
Page, a former aide on President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, had sued the Department of Justice, the FBI, and several former officials, including Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, alleging that the bureau's surveillance of him was unlawful and predicated on the discredited Steele dossier. He filed the suit in 2020. The Washington Examiner reported that the high court's refusal to take up the case means the lawsuit is now dead.
The DOJ had already settled the portion of the suit involving government agencies for $1.25 million. But Page wanted the individual officials held accountable, too. The courts said no, at every level.
The procedural history of Page's lawsuit reads like a tour of the federal judiciary's revolving door. When he filed in 2020, the case landed on the docket of then-district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Jackson was elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2021, and then to the Supreme Court in 2022. She recused herself from the case at the high court. The Supreme Court's orders list noted that Justice Jackson did not take part in consideration of the petition.
After Jackson's departure from the district court, the case fell to U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee. Friedrich's 2022 ruling drew a line that ultimately doomed Page's claims against the senior officials: she held that Page could sue the individuals who actually conducted the surveillance, but not the people who authorized it.
That distinction matters. The agents who physically carried out the wiretapping are one thing. The decision-makers, Comey, McCabe, and the rest, are another. Friedrich's ruling effectively shielded the architects of the surveillance from personal liability while leaving Page to pursue only the lower-level operatives. A federal appeals court upheld that decision.
Months before the Supreme Court's Monday orders list, the DOJ settled with Page for $1.25 million on the claims against the government agencies named in the suit. That settlement acknowledged, at minimum, that the case had enough substance to warrant a payout from taxpayers.
But the settlement did not extend to the former officials Page had sued in their personal capacities. Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page walked away without paying a dime out of their own pockets. The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the appeal locks that result in place.
Comey, of course, faces his own separate legal troubles. A federal grand jury indicted the former FBI director on charges tied to an Instagram post, and he subsequently surrendered on those federal charges.
The Comey indictment has generated its own courtroom drama. A federal judge pushed Comey's trial to October, and the prosecution team itself has seen upheaval, with the lead prosecutor who secured the indictment departing the case without public explanation.
The broader pattern here is difficult to miss. The FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to monitor an American citizen based on opposition research material, the Steele dossier, that was later discredited. The DOJ's own inspector general found serious errors in the FISA applications. Page was never charged with a crime.
Yet every court that reviewed Page's civil claims against the officials who set the surveillance in motion found a reason to dismiss them. Friedrich's distinction, you can sue the hands, not the head, left Page chasing the lowest-ranking participants while the senior leaders who approved the operation faced no civil consequences.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has publicly argued that the government's case against Comey rests on far more than a single social media post. Whether that criminal case produces accountability where the civil courts did not remains an open question.
The Supreme Court's Monday orders list also rejected dozens of other petitions and announced three new cases it will hear when its upcoming term begins in October. The justices have so far accepted 14 cases for that term. They still have roughly 20 argued cases to decide before the current term wraps up by the end of the month.
None of that context changes what Monday's order means for Carter Page. Five years of litigation. Three levels of federal courts. A $1.25 million government settlement that confirmed something went wrong. And not one of the senior officials who authorized the surveillance will answer for it in a civil courtroom.
Meanwhile, the separate criminal proceedings involving Comey continue on their own uncertain track, offering a different but narrow avenue toward the kind of individual accountability the civil courts refused to deliver.
The Supreme Court did not explain its decision. It never does when it declines a petition. But the silence speaks volumes to anyone who watched the FBI use a politically funded dossier to justify spying on an American who was never charged, never convicted, and never found to have done anything wrong.
The government paid $1.25 million of taxpayer money to make part of this case go away. That is not the behavior of an institution confident it did nothing wrong. But the individuals who made the calls, who signed the applications, who pushed the investigation forward, remain personally untouched by the judiciary.
Page alleged that the surveillance was predicated on the discredited Steele dossier to investigate supposed ties between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia. Those ties were never established. The dossier's credibility collapsed. The FISA process was shown to be riddled with errors. And yet the legal system, from the district court to the Supreme Court, declined to let a jury weigh whether the officials responsible should pay a personal price.
The $1.25 million came from the public treasury, meaning taxpayers covered the cost of the FBI's conduct. The officials who approved the surveillance paid nothing. That arrangement tells you everything about how Washington's accountability structure actually works.
When the government can spy on a citizen using discredited political opposition research, settle with him using taxpayer money, and then watch every court in the land shield the decision-makers from personal liability, the word "accountability" has lost its meaning.
