What Page Is Missing
NO matter how poorly you believe President Trump treats women, no matter how inappropriate you find his tweets and no matter how excessive you find his accusations of “treason,” there are serious unanswered questions about Lisa Page’s conduct at the FBI.
The former FBI lawyer is, at the very least, someone whose unprofessional behavior compromised the integrity of an investigation into the president.
Yet her canonization is fully underway this week, led by liberals who were once concerned about law-enforcement abuse.
Page surfaced on Twitter this Sunday to announce: “I’m done being quiet.” She then offered her followers a link to an interview with writer Molly Jong-Fast at The Daily Beast.
Page claims that she only decided to speak out after Trump’s “sickening” impression, delivered at a recent rally, of her text-message exchanges with her lover and then-FBI deputy counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.
“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” she told the Web site. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”
Page has reason to be aggrieved by Trump’s mockery. However, nothing she says in The Daily Beast article assuages concerns about her unprofessional and partisan conduct. Not in the least. Not once does Page attempt to explain why she had exchanged highly partisan text messages with Strzok while investigations into two presidential candidates were ongoing. Not once does she apologize or even acknowledge any of her unethical behavior.
Of course, Page shouldn’t feel abused or scared in public. But it’s possible for someone to both feel aggrieved by presidential mockery — and to have wrongly broken the public trust while in a highpowered position.
It wasn’t Trump, after all, but the FBI’s internal investigation that found Page had inflicted damage to the agency that went “to the heart of the FBI’s reputation for neutral fact-finding and political independence.”
It was the inspector-general report, not the meanies at a proTrump Web site, who found the text messages between the two had “potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations.”
It was special counsel Robert Mueller, not Attorney General Bob Barr, who fired Strzok and Page after he learned of the text messages, because he feared they would further compound the perception that the investigation was prejudiced against Trump.
It was Page who asked: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
It was Strzok who replied: “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
Their liberal fans ask us to believe that Strzok and Page were chaste investigators for the FBI, who never let their opinions undermine their professional duties. But would anyone in the world trust a law-enforcement agent who had said it was his mission to “stop you”?
The duo shared another dozen or so texts demonstrating political prejudice of the kind. Would you consider investigators who behaved this way even minimally reliable?
What does seem rather suspicious about all of this — and so many of the other preemptive leaks and defenses of those involved in the early days of the surveillance operation against Trump’s 2016 campaign — is that the Department of Justice’s internal-watchdog report is set to arrive soon.
As that report radiates through Washington, there’s no plausible argument to be made that the public should ignore this animosity for Trump.
There is also no plausible scenario in which Page, who had been involved in the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server and Trump’s “collusion,” is merely an innocent, upstanding professional.
No matter what the Justice report says, Page isn’t blameless in the situation.