Of the many misfit toys that Donald Trump called advisers to his chaotic presidential campaign, perhaps the most unassuming is self-professed energy expert turned amateur foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, a man so deeply incompetent that a Kremlin agent who tried to recruit him reportedly gave up, telling his colleagues that Page was “an idiot.” Few, with the notable exception of Paul Manafort, have been excommunicated as thoroughly. Still, Page has remained a steadfast member of Trumpworld by his own design, insinuating that he belongs among the ranks of mysterious operatives who facilitated Trump’s ascendance to the White House, even as the White House signals its intense disinterest.

Following a brief foray into the world of statement hats, Page reemerged in the public eye earlier this month, when he filed an amicus brief against the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. The consolidation of the respective telecommunications and media companies, he wrote, “encourages extreme levels of journalistic recklessness and impropriety because it allocates considerable resources to the media outlets under their control.” (Page, an armchair foreign-policy scholar, knows this for a fact, thanks to his experience being smeared by the “telecommunications-media oligopoly” during the election.)

The Trump administration, it seems, did not appreciate the effort. According to Politico, the Justice Department took the unusual step of requesting that the judge throw out Page’s brief. “As a general matter, the Anti-Trust Division does not oppose amicus briefs in the district courts,” D.O.J. attorney Craig Conrath told the court. “We note, however, that Dr. Page’s submission does not appear to be meaningfully relevant to the issues in this case.” (Indeed, the D.O.J. is arguing that the proposed merger violates numerous anti-trust laws and could stifle competition—issues that have nothing to do with Page’s cries of fake news.)

This is not the first time Page’s analyses have been rejected—according to The New York Times, the erstwhile Trump aide tried unsuccessfully to publish his doctoral dissertation, which one of its reviewers called “very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument,” giving it a “thumbs down.” (Page blamed the rejection on the “anti-former Soviet Union, anti-Russia sentiment of various academic publishers.”) But in this case, he brushed off the snub, telling reporters he was “not disappointed at all” by the court’s decision, and adding, “it took many years to develop the current detrimental oligopolistic market structures. So figuring out appropriate repairs . . . will inevitably take some time.”