Tipsheet

Lisa Page Speaks Out...and Casts Herself as the Victim

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  December 02, 2019 8:04 AM

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who had an extramarital affair with ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok and exchanged anti-Trump text messages over fear he'd be elected, announced Sunday she was breaking her silence.

“I’m done being quiet,” she tweeted along with a link to a Daily Beast interview with her, in which she argues she did not commit any crime.

The article comes days before DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to release a report into possible FBI misconduct.

Page explains that she had finally had enough of staying silent after Trump’s “demeaning fake orgasm” at a Minneapolis rally in October.

Here’s the section of the rally she was referring to. You can decide for yourself whether you think that’s what it was.

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“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” Page told The Daily Beast's Molly Jong-Fast. “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.” 

She said when the president tweets about her it feels like she’s “being punched in the gut.”

“The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world,” she said. “He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”

Page 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.”

She spoke of the Clinton email investigation and what it was like when former FBI Director James Comey was fired.

She insisted there was “no case to be brought here” but they pressed on at the direction of Comey who wanted it done ASAP and “outside the political environment.”

Page said it was “devastating” when Comey was fired, going on to compare it to a funeral, “only worse.”

Later in the interview she talked about when she first found out she was under investigation by the DOJ Inspector General’s office in July 2017, saying she had “no idea what they’re talking about.”

“I don't have the first clue what they're talking about. What I do know is that my text messages will reveal that I had previously had an affair,” she said. “I’m overwhelmed by dread and embarrassment at the prospect that OIG investigators, Andy, and my colleagues, now know or could learn about this deeply personal secret.”

She insisted her texts with Strzok about the president weren’t overtly political and argued that they fell within the “permissible bounds of the Hatch Act.”

Page compared the ongoing nature of the controversy and what she goes through on a day-to-day basis to PTSD.

Does it feel like a trauma? “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.”

And it’s still going on? “I mean, he tweeted about me four days ago,” she told me on Nov. 18. “When Roger Stone got convicted, he asked, why isn’t Page in jail too? Not to mention, you know, his truly reprehensible, degrading stunt at his rally, in which he used my name to simulate an orgasm. And I don’t ever know when the president’s going to attack next. And when it happens, it can still sort of upend my day. You don’t really get used to it.”

Social media users were quick to call her out for portraying herself as the victim.