Former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who conspired with fired FBI agent Peter Strzok to stop Donald Trump if he won the presidency, testified in front of a closed door session on Capitol Hill last year. Now her testimony has been released, showing the extent to which the duo was willing to go with their efforts. It reveals the "insurance policy" discussed in text messages was likely Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation.
"If he is not elected, then, to the extent that the Russians were colluding with members of his team, we're still going to investigate that even without him being President, because any time the Russians do anything with a U.S. person, we care, and it's very serious to us," Page said about her thinking under questioning from former Congressman Trey Gowdy. "But if he becomes President, that totally changes the game because now he is President of the United States. He's going to immediately start receiving classified briefings. He's going to be exposed to the most sensitive secrets imaginable. And if there is somebody on his team who wittingly or unwittingly is working with the Russians, that is super serious."
Text messages found between Page and Strzok, with whom she was having an affair, discuss a meeting in fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe's office to go over an "insurance policy." A number of other messages showed Strzok and Page repeatedly slamming Trump and his supporters while favoring the election of Hillary Clinton.
Further, her testimony reveals there was no evidence of collusion at the time the Special Counsel investigation was launched in May 2017. Nearly two years later, there is still no evidence.
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The newly released transcripts of my interview with Lisa Page indicate that Peter Strzok had no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia prior to the launch of the FBI and special counsel investigations into the matter. pic.twitter.com/Mt8SChdocI
— John Ratcliffe (@RepRatcliffe) March 13, 2019
As a reminder, the Department of Justice Inspector General found the anti-Trump messages exchanged between Page and Strzok to be deeply troubling. From a report released in August 2018:
"During the course of the review, the OIG discovered text messages and instant messages between some FBI employees on the investigative team, conducted using FBI mobile devices and computers, that expressed statements of hostility toward then candidate Donald Trump and statements of support for then candidate Clinton," the report states. "We were deeply troubled by text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations."
"Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, 'No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it' in response to her question '[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!', it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice," the report continues.
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