The Department of Justice just cut a check for $1.25 million to Carter Page — the former Trump campaign adviser who the FBI illegally spied on using a fraudulent FISA warrant that was based on a fake dossier that was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The DOJ settled because they knew they’d lose even bigger in court.
We told you so. We told you in 2017. We told you in 2018. We told you every single year since, while the media called us conspiracy theorists and the Democrats pretended this was all perfectly normal. Turns out “perfectly normal” costs $1.25 million when the lawyers get involved.
For those of you keeping score at home — and we absolutely are — here’s a quick recap of what actually happened. The FBI wanted to spy on the Trump campaign. They couldn’t get a warrant because there was no evidence of anything. So they took a fictional opposition research document paid for by Hillary Clinton, dressed it up like intelligence, and presented it to a secret court. Four times. They submitted fraudulent FISA applications four times to keep the surveillance going on an American citizen who had committed zero crimes.
An FBI lawyer literally altered an email to make it say the opposite of what it actually said so the warrant would go through. That lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty. He got probation. Probation! The man fabricated evidence to spy on a political opponent’s associate and he got the legal equivalent of a stern talking-to.
And what did Carter Page actually do wrong? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was never charged with a single crime. Not one. The entire Russiagate investigation — the one that consumed three years of the country’s attention, cost tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and nearly destroyed a presidency — produced exactly zero evidence that Carter Page was a Russian agent. Because he wasn’t one. He was a Naval Academy graduate who once briefed the CIA on his contacts in Russia. The FBI knew this. They hid it from the FISA court.
Remember when the media spent two solid years telling us that Trump was a Russian puppet? Remember when Adam Schiff went on every cable news show that would have him — which was all of them — and said he had “direct evidence” of collusion? Remember the breathless breaking news chyrons? The panel discussions? The anonymous sources?
All of it was garbage. Every last word.
The Mueller investigation found no collusion. The Durham investigation found that the FBI had no legitimate basis to launch the probe in the first place. The Inspector General found seventeen “significant errors or omissions” in the FISA applications. Seventeen! That’s not a mistake. That’s a pattern. That’s the federal government deciding that spying on a political campaign was more important than following the law.
And now we have the receipt. $1.25 million, paid by the United States Department of Justice, because the FBI violated an American citizen’s constitutional rights in order to take down a president they didn’t like.
The real scandal was never Trump and Russia. The real scandal was always the FBI and the FISA court. It was unelected bureaucrats with unchecked power deciding they knew better than 63 million voters. They weaponized the most powerful surveillance apparatus on Earth against a political campaign because they didn’t like the outcome of a democratic election.
$1.25 million sounds like a lot of money. It isn’t. Not for what they did. Carter Page had his name dragged through the mud on every news network in America for years. He was treated like a foreign spy by his own government. His life was turned inside out based on a document that was essentially fan fiction written by a British ex-spy who got his information from a Russian source who later said he was just speculating over beers.
(You genuinely cannot make up a plot this stupid. If you pitched this to Netflix they’d send it back and tell you to make it more believable.)
But here’s what matters now. The check cleared. The DOJ admitted — without saying the words out loud — that the FBI committed one of the most egregious abuses of government power in modern American history. They spied on a citizen. They lied to a court. They did it to influence a presidential election. And when the dust settled, the taxpayers got stuck with the bill.
Every single person who told you Russiagate was legitimate owes you an apology. Every anchor. Every “intelligence expert.” Every politician who stood at a podium and said the walls were closing in. They were either lying or they were too stupid to read the actual evidence. Neither option is a good look.
The walls weren’t closing in on Trump. They were closing in on the truth. And $1.25 million later, the truth won.