Report: Official who approved $2 million payouts to biased FBI workers now working against Trump
During the height of the Russiagate scandal created by Democrats in an attempt to undermine President Donald Trump’s first term, an FBI agent was working on the bureau’s attacks.
And Peter Strzok had an email exchange with his mistress, Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, and they reassured each other that Trump would not be allowed to win the 2016 election.
He did, and their conspiratorial emails became public knowledge as part of the many investigations into those schemes.
They sued, claiming their emails were private, despite being done on government time and with government resources, and one official agreed, approving a $1.2 million settlement with Strzok and an $800,000 payment to Page.
Now a report in the Federalist reveals that the official signing off on those payments was Brian Netter, a deputy assistant attorney general.
And he now has left the government, revealing his political agenda by joining a group called Democracy Forward, a Democrat party-affiliated group launched specifically to fight 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,” the report said.
The report describes Netter as one of the “disgraced Russia collusion hoax participants” who left the Department of Justice to help lead the “legal resistance” to President Donald Trump and other duly-elected Republicans.
“[W]e have identified Brian Netter, Deputy Assistant Attorney General as the individual that approved the settlement agreements,” a DOJ official told the Center to Advance Security in America, the report said.
That organization had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2024, when the payouts were publicly announced.
Democracy Forward is led by Marc Elias, the lawyer who’s known for schemes to damage “the integrity of both the 2016 and 2020 elections.”
In fact, the report explains he “signed the checks for [Hillary Clinton] campaign’s Russia collusion hoax.”
The report notes he also was active in fighting Trump during the aftermath to the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and riot at the Capital. He was with Merrick Garland’s DOJ from 2021 through 2025, and opposed Trump’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block National Archives releases to the partisan panel ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up to “review” those events.
The members hired television experts to stage specially selected “evidence” and present it to Americans in an effort to persuade them that Trump was an “insurrectionist.”
The report noted Netter also married Democrat lawyer and activist Karen Dunn, who was a key player in the campaign by the twice-failed candidate Hillary Clinton.
Dunn also was integral in Democrat operations for Barack Obama and another failed candidate, Kamala Harris.
“Congressional overseers were upset by the reward given to the hoaxers and demanded to know who signed off on them,” the report said. “They were thwarted by officials who said they didn’t know who had authorized the payments, and declined to respond to congressional inquiries to find out.”
James Fitzpatrick of the Center to Advance Security in America called the payouts “a prime example of the outrageous abuse of power endured by the American people under Joe Biden.”