A Delaware judge dismissed a defamation suit former Trump advisor Carter Page filed against a Verizon subsidiary that runs sites including Yahoo News and AOL, and formerly owned the HuffPost, the Washington Post reports.

In July 2020, Page sued Oath, Inc., a company that was rebranded as Verizon Media, claiming that its constituent entities defamed him by falsely linking him to the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  Page claimed he was harmed by false and defamatory information published by the companies as far back as 2016.

Judge Craig Karsnitz of the Superior Court of Delaware, however, ruled that the stories, including those by reporter Michael Isikoff, were not defamatory nor were they untrue.

Page pointed to passages of an Isikoff article that referred to the FBI investigating information reported by the so-called Steele dossier, which Isikoff referred to as an “intelligence report.”  Isikoff also called Christopher Steele “a well placed intelligence source.”

Page claimed that the characterizations of the information was too definitive and he had claimed that the information the story related were false and that they damaged his public and professional images.

Karsnitz stated that Isikoff’s reporting was accurate:  that the FBI was investigating Page and that the information leading to the investigation was derived from the Steele dossier.  The characterizations were accurate and not misleading, the judge said.

“An intelligence report is simply a report of information potentially relevant to an investigation,” Karsnitz wrote. “It can take many forms, be true or false, and can be used as opposition research and an intelligence report.”