August 1, 2025 – DOJ official who approved $2 million payout to Strzok/Page has been identified as left-wing activist Brian Netter

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

The Department of Justice official who signed off on $2 million in taxpayer-funded payments to disgraced Russia collusion hoax participants left the Department of Justice to help lead the “legal resistance” to President Donald Trump and other duly-elected Republicans, new records reviewed exclusively by The Federalist reveal.

FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, sued the Department of Justice over the release of messages detailing their role in pushing the Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. They said the release of the messages that were written using government resources violated their privacy. The Biden administration rewarded the duo with lucrative payouts. Strozk received $1.2 million in taxpayer funds while Page received an $800,000 settlement.

“[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, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2024, when the payouts were publicly announced. Netter was the deputy assistant attorney general for the Federal Programs Branch during the term of President Joe Biden.

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.

Marc Elias, the attorney known for his work damaging the integrity of both the 2016 and 2020 elections, chairs the board of Democracy Forward. Elias, as the Clinton campaign general counsel, signed the checks for her campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. To hide the Russia collusion hoax’s origins, the funding was fraudulently run through Elias’s law firm as “legal services.” Clinton was fined only $113,000 for the false claims she made to hide her role. Elias also ran Democrats’ legal effort to destabilize the 2020 elections with the sudden expansion of unsupervised mail-in balloting operations staffed by Democrat-run nonprofit groups. (Read more: The Federalist, 8/1/2025)  (Archive)

Karen Dunn is an American attorney and political operative. Dunn is a former partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. As an attorney, she has represented clients including Apple, Oracle, and Uber, and in 2021, she defended Apple in a lawsuit brought by Epic Games. Dunn is a specialist in debate preparation in Democratic politics, particularly for candidates for president and vice president. Dunn and Ron Klain co-led President Barack Obama’s presidential debate preparation team in 2012 and led the presidential debate preparation for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Wikipedia

The couple that litigates together: Brian Netter and Karen Dunn, May 2016. (Credit: Evy Mages)