The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page's appeal in his lawsuit against former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and other FBI officials over the government surveillance that targeted him during the 2016 Russia investigation. The high court rejected the appeal in a brief order with no comment, leaving Page with no remaining legal avenue to hold the officials personally accountable for a wiretap that the government's own inspector general later found was built on a series of mistakes and errors.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not take part in the deliberations. The court offered no explanation for its refusal.
For Page, a man who was never charged with any wrongdoing, the decision closes a chapter that began with one of the most consequential abuses of federal surveillance power in modern memory. The FBI obtained a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor a private American citizen working as a foreign policy adviser to a presidential campaign. The Justice Department's own inspector general concluded in 2019 that the warrant process was riddled with mistakes and errors. And yet the courts have now told Page, in effect, that he waited too long to sue over it.
Page filed his lawsuit in November 2020, targeting both the FBI and the Department of Justice as institutions, as well as individual former officials including Comey and McCabe. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., concluded that a three-year statute of limitations barred his claims against the individual officials.
Page argued that the clock on the statute of limitations should have started ticking with the inspector general's 2019 report, the moment the public learned the full scope of the FBI's errors. The appeals court disagreed. In his petition to the Supreme Court, filed in December, Page warned that the lower court's reasoning created a legal trap.
He argued the decision meant such lawsuits would fall into a:
"Catch-22 that such claims will either be dismissed as too speculative or as time-barred."
The Supreme Court evidently found that argument unpersuasive, or at least not worth taking up. The justices let the lower court ruling stand without a word of explanation.
The Court's refusal comes during a term in which it faces a heavy docket of politically charged cases with direct implications for the current administration's agenda. That the justices chose not to wade into the FISA surveillance question, even after the inspector general's damning findings, speaks volumes about the Court's appetite for revisiting the Russia-era FBI's conduct.
The backstory matters. In 2016, FBI investigators sought and obtained a FISA warrant to surveil Page because of his work as a campaign adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump and what the bureau described as his connections to the Russian government. Special counsel Robert Mueller's final report later highlighted Page's pre-campaign contacts with two Russian intelligence officers, a trip Page took to Moscow in the summer of 2016 where he gave a speech that "criticized the U.S. government's foreign policy toward Russia," and interactions Page had with Kremlin officials where the Trump campaign was discussed.
None of that resulted in charges against Page.
More importantly, the Justice Department inspector general's 2019 report found that the process used to obtain the FISA warrant was based on a series of mistakes and errors. That finding became a rallying point for critics who argued the FBI had abused its surveillance authority to target a political campaign. The inspector general's conclusions were not contested by the FBI itself.
So the facts, as established by the government's own watchdog, are these: the FBI made serious errors in obtaining a warrant to spy on an American citizen, that citizen was never charged with a crime, and the courts have now decided he cannot hold the responsible officials accountable because he filed suit outside the statute of limitations window.
The question of how the Supreme Court chooses which politically sensitive cases to hear, and which to avoid, remains a source of frustration across the political spectrum.
Page's lawsuit had two tracks. One targeted the FBI and the Department of Justice as institutions. The Trump administration settled that portion of the litigation in April, though the specific terms of that settlement were not disclosed publicly.
What remained on appeal was the part of the litigation involving individual FBI officials, people who served during President Joe Biden's administration. That is the piece the Supreme Court refused to touch on Monday.
The April settlement suggests the current administration recognized that Page had a legitimate grievance against the institutions that surveilled him. The government was willing to resolve that claim. But the individual officials who oversaw or participated in the flawed warrant process, Comey and McCabe among them, now walk away without any court ever reaching the merits of Page's claims against them.
The case also arrives against a backdrop of multiple high-profile legal battles making their way to the nation's highest court, raising broader questions about the justices' willingness to engage with cases that carry significant political weight.
Consider the sequence of events from Page's perspective. Federal agents obtained a surveillance warrant against him using a process the government's own inspector general later called flawed. He was monitored by his own government. He was publicly associated with a sprawling investigation into foreign election interference. He was never charged. And when he sued the officials responsible, the courts told him the statute of limitations had expired.
Page's "Catch-22" argument deserved more than silence from the Supreme Court. If a citizen does not know the full extent of government misconduct until an inspector general report reveals it years later, when exactly is that citizen supposed to file suit? The appeals court's answer, that the clock started running before the misconduct was fully documented, creates a perverse incentive for federal agencies to delay accountability reviews.
The broader implications extend well beyond one man's lawsuit. FISA warrants operate in secret, by design. Targets often do not learn they were surveilled until long after the fact. If the statute of limitations runs from the date of the surveillance rather than the date the target learns of the government's errors, the practical effect is to shield officials from personal liability in nearly every case.
That is not a hypothetical concern. It is exactly what happened here.
Meanwhile, tensions surrounding the Supreme Court continue to run high, with public confidence in the institution tested by decisions that leave major questions unresolved.
The Russia investigation consumed years of national attention, cost tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and produced a special counsel report that, whatever else it found, did not establish that Carter Page committed any crime. The FBI's own warrant process was later exposed as defective by the Justice Department's internal watchdog.
Page sought the one thing the legal system is supposed to provide: a forum to hold officials accountable when the government violates a citizen's rights. The federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, have now closed every door available to him on the individual-liability claims.
The Trump administration's April settlement with the FBI and DOJ acknowledged, at least implicitly, that something went wrong. But settlements with institutions do not name names. They do not assign personal responsibility. They do not deter the next set of officials who might cut corners on a FISA application.
Comey and McCabe faced no criminal charges over the FISA process. They now face no civil liability either. The inspector general documented the errors. The courts declined to act on them. The Supreme Court declined even to discuss the matter.
When the government can surveil an innocent citizen, admit it made mistakes, and then hide behind a statute of limitations to avoid accountability, the system is not protecting liberty. It is protecting the people who abused it.