Carter Page, the energy consultant and Trump advisor, is finally doing what needs to be done: He's suing the Democratic National Committee.

According to Fox News:

Former Trump campaign official Carter Page announced on Monday a defamation lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over the salacious dossier that claims he has ties to Russia.

Page is also suing Perkins Coie and its partners, a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign and hired Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that hired former British spy Christopher Steele who compiled the unverified dossier concerning Trump, his associates, and Russia.

Page told Fox News’ “Hannity” on Monday that his lawsuit goes “beyond any damages or any financial aspects.”

Page, at it happens, was the linchpin that opened the gate to the FISA warrant that enabled the Obama administration to spy on Trump campaign officials. So long as Carter Page, with his business ties to Russia was in it, all of the machinery of government surveillance power was possible to crank into gear in the great Democratic bid to prove Russian collusion to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, supposedly between Donald Trump and his Kremlin masters.

And amazingly, the FBI found nothing on the man, nothing, despite 24/7 surveillance on every last thing he did. They also had intelligence reports suggesting that the Russians considered Page 'an idiot,' so there was plenty of reason to think the dossier was concocted out of thin air to advance Democratic political purposes. As Eli Lake wrote in his essay called 'We Should Care About What Happened to Carter Page,' it is a bigger issue than it looks because Fourth Amendment protections were violated, as Sean Hannity notes, and that can affect all of us:

The current debate over Page is whether the FBI overreached by seeking a warrant to spy on him from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the end of 2016. Republicans claim the FBI improperly relied on the opposition research dossier. Democrats say the Republican memo omits information that would discredit the GOP's case.

But that misses a broader and more important point. It's a scandal that the public has known for more than a year that the FBI suspected Page of being a foreign agent in the first place. He has yet to be charged with a crime, but his reputation is in tatters because an element of the bureau's investigation into Russia's influence over the 2016 election has been publicly reported.

Now that he's been found blameless, well, he gets to pick up the pieces.

Page never got the job he likely wanted in the Trump administration, his reputation is ruined, his business is gone, and everyone gets to read the intelligence reports saying the Russians considered him an idiot. Yet amazingly, he never did a thing that was wrong. The FBI takes some consequences for this in the hit to its reputation for protecting informants (Page helped them out on an earlier Russian espionage case a few years ago and then got the Deep State blanket surveillance as if he were a crook, instead of a pleasant FBI courtesy call asking for information). But the DNC, conniving up the fake dossier because they knew of the guy and decided to use him as a linchpin to prise open an attack on Trump, gets off scot-free.

Well, with this lawsuit, not any longer. Page says it's less about money than principle, and he's right. But the only way to get the Democrats' attention is with money, and it's to be hoped he gets some. The lawsuit looks like an immensely winnable one, given the power and ruin they exerted on him, and his complete innocence of any wrongdoing. Let's hope a jury gets them taught a lesson as they pay the piper, before they can do it again to anyone else.