- Lisa Page, one of the FBI officials singled out by President Donald Trump in his bid to portray the Russia investigation as a partisan inquiry designed to undermine him, spoke with The Daily Beast about the impact of the attacks.
- “The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world,” Page told the publication. “He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”
- Page said the final straw was Trump’s “degrading stunt” at a rally in October when he used her name to apparently simulate an orgasm.
- In December 2017, the Justice Department’s watchdog released messages between Page and Peter Strzok, a senior FBI counterintelligence official with whom she was having an affair, that criticized Trump.
- Page and Strzok were removed from the Russia investigation after the messages came to light.
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The former FBI attorney Lisa Page told The Daily Beast about the impact of being singled out in “degrading” attacks by President Donald Trump as he sought to portray the Russia investigation as a partisan hit job.
The president and his allies have kept up a steady stream of attacks against Page, who worked as a trial attorney on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
She became a focus of their attacks after it emerged in December 2017 that she had exchanged messages with Peter Strzok, an FBI counterintelligence official she was having an affair with, that were critical of Trump and expressed concern about a Trump presidency.
The messages included:
- "This man cannot be president," Page said in 2016.
- "I'm scared for our organization," Strzok said of a Trump presidency.
- Hillary Clinton "just has to win now," Page said. "I'm not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump."
Republicans seized on the messages to portray the entire Russia investigation as a partisan attempt to undermine Trump.
Page has kept a low profile since then, until the Daily Beast profile published Sunday.
"My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world," she told The Daily Beast. "He's demeaning me and my career. It's sickening."
She added: "But it's also very intimidating because he's still the president of the United States. And when the president accuses you of treason by name, despite the fact that I know there's no fathomable way that I have committed any crime at all, let alone treason, he's still somebody in a position to actually do something about that. To try to further destroy my life.
"It never goes away or stops, even when he's not publicly attacking me."
Page said she decided to speak out after Trump mocked her and Strzok at a rally in Minneapolis on October 10.
In a "truly reprehensible, degrading stunt at his rally," Trump "used my name to simulate an orgasm," she said, describing it as "the straw that broke the camel's back."
"It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative," she said. "I decided to take my power back."
On Sunday, an unverified Twitter account called @NatSecLisa that uses Page's name posted a link to The Daily Beast's interview alongside the caption "I'm done being quiet." It's the first and only tweet on the account's page.
https://twitter.com/EdwardTHardy/status/1182657104798257153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The texts between Page and Strzok were made public in December 2017 amid an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general, the department's watchdog, into the FBI's actions around the 2016 election.
Both officials were removed from Mueller's team after the messages came to light.
In the interview, Page criticized the Justice Department - where she previously worked - for releasing selections of her messages with Strzok to the media and accused it of failing to defend her when she became a target of partisan attacks.
She said that under Trump, the department had abandoned its core principles.
"It's particularly devastating to be betrayed by an organization I still care about so deeply," she said. "And it's crushing to see the noble Justice Department, my Justice Department, the place I grew up in, feel like it's abandoned its principles of truth and independence."
The Justice Department later said that five months' worth of Page and Strzok's texts had gone missing, prompting Trump to push the conspiracy theory of a wide-ranging partisan plot by officials to undermine his presidency.
The department concluded that thousands of FBI phones had a fault with the technology used to sweep text messages.
Strzok is suing the Justice Department and FBI over his firing, alleging that the move was politically motivated and unconstitutional.