Two million dollars in taxpayer money used to pay off two disgraced FBI participants in the Trump Russian collusion narrative was approved by a former Department of Justice (DOJ) official who has gone on to help lead the current “legal resistance” against President Donald Trump.
That’s the conclusion of a report in the Federalist based on new records reviewed exclusively by the publication and obtained by the Center to Advance Security in America under a Freedom of Information Request.
The $2 million settlement in 2024 to FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page followed their lawsuits against the DOJ over the release of text messages related to their role in pushing what the Federalist called “the Clinton campaign’s Russian collusion hoax.”
Critics said the payments were a “sweetheart deal” since the pair never would have prevailed if the case had gone to trial.
According to the Federalist, Brian Netter, a former DOJ deputy attorney general under President Joe Biden’s DOJ from 2021 until early 2025, approved the settlement agreements.
He has since moved on from the DOJ, with the Federalist reporting:
Netter currently serves as the legal director at Democracy Forward, a Democrat Party-affiliated group launched in 2017 to fight President Trump with lawfare. The group brags that it took Trump to court more than 100 times in his first term in office. It has continued its use of the courts to win political battles into his second term in office. “Liberal Legal Group Positions Itself as a Top Trump Administration Foe,” touted the New York Times last November.
As Breitbart News reported in May of 2024, the “FBI lovebirds” Strzok and Page claimed their right to privacy was violated with the release of their disparaging text messages about former President Donald Trump and his supporters during the Russian collusion investigation.
Trump and others blasted the pair for the texts, which included Strzok citing the “smell” of Trump supporters in a Virginia Walmart store and talk of an “insurance policy” to keep the New York developer from becoming president in the 2016 election.
In the settlement, Strozk received $1.2 million. Page received $800,00. The FBI fired Strzok in 2018 and Page resigned that same year.
Democracy Forward, Netter’s new legal home, is chaired by Marc Elias, “the attorney known for his work damaging the integrity of the 2016 land 2020 elections,” the Federalist also reported.
It noted Elias’s role in weaponizing the unverified and widely debunked Steele dossier that linked Trump with Russia.
“Elias, as the Clinton campaign general counsel, signed the checks for her campaign’s Russia collusion hoax,” the Federalist stated. “To hide the Russia collusion hoax’s origins, the funding was fraudulently run through Elias’s law firm as ‘legal services.’”
James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told the online magazine: “The American people are rightly concerned about the Biden Administration’s targeting of conservatives while their political allies were given special treatment. These settlements are a prime example of the outrageous abuse of power endured by the American people under Joe Biden.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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