Mueller Probe’s Andrew Weissmann: Lisa Page Did Nothing Wrong

Andrew Weissmann, a former investigator for Robert Mueller’s special counsel and MSNBC legal analyst, declared Monday that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page — who opposed Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy — did nothing wrong as the bureau investigated his 2016 campaign.

A partial transcript is as follows: 

ANDREA MITCHELL: Lisa Page gave her first interview. She, of course, is a former FBI official, who is constantly excoriated on Twitter and social media by the president himself. You know her. And here she’s speaking to Molly Jong Fast, here for the first time speaking out about what it feels like to be attacked over and over and over again. She said in this interview: “I have to deal with the aftermath of having the most wrong thing I’ve ever done in my life become public. And that’s when I become the source of the president’s personal mockery and insults.”

And the question she was asked: “Does it feel like a trauma?” And she replied: “It is. I wouldn’t even call it PTSD because it’s not over. It’s ongoing. It’s not a historical event that is being relived. It just keeps happening.” You know Lisa Page. We haven’t had the opportunity to interview her, but what is your impression of what she, admittedly having done something wrong in terms of the professional aspect, of her personal life and how that is playing out in the public area?

ANDREW WEISSMANN: I think there’s a legal aspect to this and a personal aspect to it. And on the personal aspect, it’s really tragic. People have affairs and it usually doesn’t play out on the front page of a newspaper, and it certainly doesn’t play out with the President of the United States — an irony that’s palpable that the president is focusing on that when this is definitely a case of glass houses. But on the legal aspect, I think there’s a very important issue here — a disservice has been done here to the public.

Lisa Page has done nothing wrong. She has a First Amendment right to speak, even as a federal employee. And so it’s really a fiction to think that jurors, judges, federal employees don’t have political views. The issue is whether they act on them. People act on principle all the time. Jurors do it, judges do it, federal prosecutors do it. And it’s simply not the case to think that personal views are going to affect what a prosecutor does.