Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, speaks at a news conference at RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Dec. 12, 2016. Page said he was in Moscow on a visit to meet with businessmen and politicians. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

Former Trump campaign aide and designated fall-guy in the attempted Democrat coup against President Trump, Carter Page, has filed a federal lawsuit against the Democrat[ic] National Committee, the law firm of Perkins Coie which hired Fusion GPS and through that entity Christopher Steele, and two partners in Perkins Coie for damages suffered by Page while embroiled in the Russia Hoax.

“This is a first step to ensure that the full extent of the FISA abuse that has occurred during the last few years is exposed and remedied,” attorney John Pierce said Thursday. “Defendants and those they worked with inside the federal government did not and will not succeed in making America a surveillance state.” He added: “This is only the first salvo. We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how high. … The rule of law will prevail.” Page first filed a defamation suit on his own against the parties in October 2018 in federal court in Oklahoma, but that suit was dismissed in January 2019 after the judge ruled the court lacked jurisdiction over the case because neither Page nor the DNC had strong enough ties to the state. Page is now represented by Pierce, the global managing partner of Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP. They filed in Illinois because they allege the relationship with the firm behind the dossier, Fusion GPS, was “orchestrated” through law firm Perkins Coie’s Chicago office. The suit also claims the DNC “has a historical pattern” of making Chicago its principal place of business. Pierce called the suit the first in a “campaign to restore Dr. Page’s name and hold those who targeted him accountable.” Page’s lawsuit does not specify the amount sought, instead seeking “compensatory, special and punitive damages in appropriate amounts to be established at trial.” The suit alleges that the DNC, Perkins Coie and partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussman “used false information, misrepresentations and other misconduct to direct the power of the international intelligence apparatus and the media industry against” Page “to further their political agenda.”

I am not a lawyer, but the DNC and Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS should be passing jagged fragments of broken bricks out their sphincters. Page was the textbook definition of a private person at the time he was targeted by Christopher Steele. Arguably, at some point, he became an “involuntary public figure.” Regardless, there seems no doubt that Page can handily prove that not only were the allegations against him false (at least Robert Mueller and Michael Horowitz concluded as much), but they were distributed with actual malice and a textbook case of reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of the allegations. In short, the Democrat party and its legal team targeted a private citizen for professional destruction, if not actual prison time, as part of a larger political scam designed to put Hillary Clinton in the White House and, later, to drive Donald Trump from it.

The real goldmine here will not be a monetary settlement, it will be the discovery process which will give Carter Page’s legal team the ability to gain access to all manner of communications by the DNC and Perkins Coie concerning anything to do with the Steele Dossier.