‘Done being quiet,’ ex-FBI lawyer slams Trump attacks
The lone tweet appeared Sunday night on a profile bearing the name of former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
“I’m done being quiet,” the tweet read.
In the roughly two years since Page made national headlines after politically charged text messages between her and then-senior FBI agent Peter Strzok were released, the lawyer has refrained from publicly addressing the events that catapulted her into the center of a political firestorm and made her a repeated target of President Donald Trump’s ire.
Now, in a wide-ranging interview, Page slammed Trump for his “sickening” attacks against her and revealed how she has struggled to keep her life together.
“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” Page, 39. told the Daily Beast in her first public interview, published Sunday. “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’s interview comes just ahead of the planned release of a report next week from the Justice Department inspector general on how the FBI conducted i ts i nvestigation i nto Trump associates and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Page and Strzok, who had been having an affair, were both involved in the probes of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russia when they exchanged text messages expressing a mutual dislike of Trump and concern that he might become president, The Washington Post’s Devlin Barrett reported in 2017.
Those messages not only sparked an official ethics investigation but also fueled accusations from the president and his supporters that the federal agency’s probe into the Trump campaign was prejudiced against him. According to the Daily Beast, Page left the FBI in May 2018. Strzok was fired several months later.
Aside from participating in a closed-door interview with House members in July 2018 where she denied that bias affected the Trump and Clinton investigations, Page did not make any other public statements about the text messages.
Her silence didn’t discourage Trump from repeatedly disparaging the attorney, mentioning her by name in dozens of tweets and retweets.
“It’s like being punched in the gut,” Page told the Daily Beast, referencing Trump’s broadsides. “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. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”
She continued: “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.”
Being singled out by Trump has changed her daily life, Page said.
“Like, when somebody makes eye contact with me on the Metro, I kind of wince, wondering if it’s because they recognize me, or are they just scanning the train like people do?” she said. “It’s immediately a question of friend or foe? Or if I’m walking down the street or shopping and there’s somebody wearing Trump gear or a MAGA hat, I’ll walk the other way or try to put some distance between us because I’m not looking for conflict. Really, what I wanted most in this world is my life back.”
A recent Trump attack motivated Page finally to speak out, she said. At an October rally in Minneapolis, Trump mocked Page’s texts to Strzok and passionately read the messages, drawing laughter from the thousands of attendees.
“Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
Trump and Republicans have seized on the texts as evidence of political bias. In May, Rep. Liz Cheney, RWyo., likened the messages to “a coup,” adding, “it could well be treason.” Tweeting shortly after his longtime political adviser Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering, Trump wondered why Page, among others, was not in jail too. “Didn’t they lie?” Trump asked.
“I don’t ever know when the president’s going to attack next,” Page told the Daily Beast. “And when it happens, it can still sort of upend my day. You don’t really get used to it.”