Carter Page Plans Lawsuit After FISA Report Revelations, Confirms He Was CIA Asset

Carter Page Plans Lawsuit After FISA Report Revelations, Confirms He Was CIA Asset
Former Trump campaign associate Carter Page participates in a discussion in Washington in a May 2019 file photograph. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Zachary Stieber
12/10/2019
Updated:
12/10/2019

Former Donald Trump campaign associate Carter Page said that he has a team of attorneys going over Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report for potential lawsuits.

The report found significant errors or omissions related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court surveillance warrant obtained against Page and renewed three times.

“There is a team, I was always working on this on my own for the last few years,” Page said, during a Dec. 9 appearance on Fox News’s “Hannity.“ ”I kept having DOJ run rings around me. Right now, as we speak, we have our team of attorneys going through that document in great detail.”
Page said he'd share what his team found with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is expected to hear from Horowitz on Dec. 11.

Page said he was a CIA asset who risked his life for his country before his reputation was severely damaged by the revelation that he was subject to surveillance because of suspected ties with Russia.

The “American people were being told lie after lie” during the investigation, which uncovered no evidence of its original premise, Page said. He said he felt “partially” vindicated, but added: “There is so much more. Every page, there is tons of additional information, which we can then provide. I think the coming lawsuit will definitely help get to the bottom of all this.”

On “Hannity,” Page read the end of FBI Director Christopher Wray’s letter to Horowitz, in which Wray said that he wants to “better position us to protect the American people against threats while upholding the Constitution.”

“Unfortunately, it was the absolute opposite. And I had tons of death threats related to these false media reports, which were also misleading the court,” Page said.

Carter Page arrives at a courthouse in New York City on April 16, 2018. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Carter Page arrives at a courthouse in New York City on April 16, 2018. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Horowitz Report

Horowitz found that the FBI made 17 significant errors or omissions in its four warrant applications to spy on Page.

“These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to OI and failing to flag important issues for discussion,” the report stated, referring to the Office of Intelligence and the National Security Division at the FBI.

Horowitz concluded that the errors and other failures constitute “serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents.”

The first warrant was secured in October 2016. Agents surveilled Page for a total of one year.

The FISA warrant application featured claims from an unverified dossier of opposition research on Trump. Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele compiled the dossier by using second- and third-hand sources with ties to the Kremlin.

Horowitz also confirmed that the FBI used four informants and more than one undercover agent against Page and George Papadopolous, another Trump campaign aide. The FBI told Horowitz’s office that it was snooping on Page and Papadopoulos because of their contacts with Russia.

But the FBI also had one of the informants reach out to a high-level Trump campaign official who wasn’t investigated. That official appears to have been Sam Clovis.

The informant has been identified by The Epoch Times and others as Cambridge professor Stefan Halper.

All of Halper’s conversations with Page, Papadopoulos, and Clovis were monitored by the FBI.

Ivan Pentchoukov and Petr Savb contributed to this report.