By Nate Raymond
WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a bid by Carter Page, an adviser to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, to revive a lawsuit against former FBI officials accusing them of unlawfully obtaining warrants to surveil him during its probe into Russian interference in that year’s election.
The justices on Monday turned away Page’s appeal of rulings by lower courts dismissing remaining elements of a lawsuit he filed in 2020 alleging he had been the victim of unlawful spying. The Trump administration agreed to pay a reported $1.25 million to resolve the rest of the claims he had also brought against the government.
That partial settlement left remaining claims Page had also been pursuing against numerous former officials. They include former FBI Director James Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe and Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that had been used to seek court approval to wiretap Page.
Page’s lawsuit alleged that, while volunteering as a member of an informal foreign policy advisory committee to Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, he became a target of an FBI surveillance program aimed at determining if anyone associated with the campaign was coordinating activities with Russia.
The FBI during the investigation obtained four warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Page.
But later reviews by the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general discovered that the FBI made numerous errors in its warrant applications to the court, which is tasked with reviewing classified requests from agencies for surveillance warrants. The inspector general released its main report on the matter in 2019, during Trump’s first term as president.
Page was never charged and has denied having had any improper communications with or ties to Russia. He asked the Supreme Court to hear his case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2025 upheld a judge’s dismissal of his lawsuit on the grounds that it was filed too late.
The D.C. Circuit said that his surveillance claim was subject to a three-year statute of limitations that kicked in when Page first became aware of the FBI’s surveillance, which it traced to an April 2017 article by the Washington Post about the operation.
Page, in asking the Supreme Court to consider his case, argued that the clock for the statute of limitations should instead be found to have begun ticking when the government acknowledged unlawfully surveilling him, rather than when an anonymously sourced news story was published.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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