Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who opposed Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy while the agency conducted critical investigations surrounding the 2016 campaign, has spoken out for the first time in a Daily Beast interview.
Page had an extramarital affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok, both of whom were involved in the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hidden emails, and of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.
The text messages between the two lovers included much anti-Trump commiserating, which led to Strzok being reassigned from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Their discussion of an “insurance” policy has fueled suspicion among Trump supporters that the agency intended to remove Trump from office if he won.
The Sunday evening interview, with the Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast, begins with the question of why Page decided to come forward now. Her reply: “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back.” (Trump recited an imaginary, comic dialogue between Page and Strzok at a recent Minnesota rally.)
Page, who proudly tweeted her interview, is speaking out a week ahead of the much-anticipated release of the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report into alleged abuses and irregularities by the FBI in its conduct of the investigation into the Trump campaign.
She told the Daily Beast: “While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people. The president has a very loud megaphone.”
Jong-Fast, observing that “having been through the MAGA meat grinder has clearly worn [Page] down,” reports that Page finds the president’s attacks “intimidating.”
She adds that the issue of Clinton’s emails “would soon give way to an actual threat to national security, one that existed not in the fever dreams of Fox and the Breitbart comments section, but in the real, dangerous world the FBI exists to protect us from” — namely, Russian interference in the election.
Page recalls that when she first found out that she was being investigated for her text messages, she did not remember sending political messages, but feared that her affair would be exposed. (Jong-Fast notes: “She doesn’t think for a minute that her texts with Peter Strzok are too political.”)
She says that the Department of Justice has “abandoned its principles of truth and independence,” though neither she nor Jong-Fast explains what she means.
Jong-Fast concludes: “It’s not just that Lisa Page may never be safe as long as Trump is President. It’s that we won’t be safe, either.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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