The Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether federal officials can be sued for abusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as Carter Page's long-running legal battle over the Russiagate investigation reaches the nation's highest court.
Page, an energy consultant who briefly served as a foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, filed a petition with the Supreme Court on December 11, 2025. The case, Carter Page v. James B. Comey, names then-FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as defendants, Just The News reported.
The nine justices are currently considering whether to hear it. The government has successfully asked for permission to delay its response until mid-March.
Page's lawyers laid out the core allegation in their filing:
"The Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained four warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Petitioner Dr. Carter Page. But its applications contained multiple errors, omissions, and misstatements that the FBI later concluded vitiated its showing of probable cause."
Read that again. The FBI itself later concluded that its own probable cause showing was gutted by errors, omissions, and misstatements. These weren't warrants obtained against a cartel kingpin or a known terrorist operative. They were obtained against an American citizen who advised a presidential campaign.
The abuses didn't stop at flawed warrant applications. Page's motion also alleged that FBI personnel actively leaked details of the surveillance to the press:
"Worse, it was later revealed that two agents leaked information about the FBI's surveillance to the press, resulting in an April 2017 article in The Washington Post."
So federal agents surveilled a U.S. citizen on faulty pretenses, then leaked that surveillance to reporters. The surveillance became the story, and the story became the justification. A perfectly closed loop.
Page filed his federal lawsuit in 2020, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Comey and the other former officials. He alleged the investigation was politically motivated.
Federal courts dismissed the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the dismissal. At every level, the judiciary effectively told Page that the people who surveilled him on faulty grounds, and then leaked it, could not be held financially accountable.
That is the question now before the Supreme Court: not whether the FISA process was abused, but whether anyone can ever be made to answer for it.
The Justice Department has acknowledged serious mistakes in the FISA process related to Page. That acknowledgment makes the lower courts' dismissals all the more striking. The government concedes the process was broken. The courts say nobody pays for breaking it.
FISA was enacted in 1978 to give the government powerful surveillance tools while theoretically protecting Americans from the kind of domestic spying abuses that defined the Nixon era. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was supposed to be the safeguard, the check that ensured these extraordinary powers were used only when warranted.
Carter Page's case reveals what happens when the safeguard fails. Four warrants were issued. The underlying applications were riddled with problems severe enough that the FBI itself later disavowed them. Agents leaked classified surveillance information. And when the target of all this sought legal recourse, every court told him the officials involved were beyond his reach.
If federal officials can obtain surveillance warrants through flawed applications, acknowledge the flaws after the fact, and face zero legal consequences, then the FISA court isn't a safeguard. It's a rubber stamp with no eraser.
This is not an abstract question about government procedure. It is a question about whether the intelligence community operates under the law or above it. Conservatives have warned for years that the national security apparatus was weaponized during the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign. The facts of Page's case are not in serious dispute. What remains in dispute is whether those facts entitle an American citizen to his day in court.
The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to take the case. The government's delayed response pushes any decision further into the 2025–2026 term. That delay itself is worth noting. The government is in no rush to have this question answered.
If the justices decline to hear Page v. Comey, the message is clear: FISA abuses carry no personal cost for the officials who commit them. If they take it, the court will confront a question that goes to the foundation of civil liberties in the surveillance age.
Carter Page became the subject of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation. His name was dragged through years of breathless media coverage. The warrants used to surveil him were built on a foundation the FBI itself later admitted couldn't hold. He has spent six years in court trying to hold someone accountable.
The nine justices now hold the answer to whether accountability is even possible.
