Donald Trump tore into former FBI lawyer Lisa Page on Monday after Page said she did nothing wrong when she investigated Kremlin interference in the U.S. presidential election — and called Trump’s attacks on her “sickening” and “reprehensible.”
Trump again focused on an issue that has apparently captivated him: Page’s onetime affair with former FBI agent and investigative partner Peter Strzok, referring to the two as “lovers” in the present tense. Page said in an interview with the Daily Beast on Sunday that she finally decided to speak out after Trump pretended at a campaign rally last month to be Page and Strzok in the middle of an orgasm.
Trump also mocked Page’s insistence on her innocence and of feeling crushed by the president’s attacks.
“When Lisa Page, the lover of Peter Strzok, talks about being ‘crushed,’ and how innocent she is, ask her to read Peter’s ‘Insurance Policy’ text, to her, just in case Hillary loses,” he tweeted.
The “insurance policy text” refers to Strzok’s message to Page calling pursuit of an investigation into Russian interference for a Trump victory an “insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” Trump and his supporters argue that the two were trying to cook up an election spoiler for Trump. But Strzok has testified that it appeared before the election that Trump was unlikely to win, so there was was no need to pull out all the stops in the probe, which is what the text referred to.
There are no missing, “scrubbed” messages, as Trump insists in the tweet. Texts were inadvertently lost from Strzok and Page’s cellphones due to faulty technology, not malicious intent, the Justice Department’s inspector general determined in a report last year. More than 20,000 texts were subsequently recovered.
Trump has claimed that derogatory text messages about him that the two shared during their investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election was proof they were out to get him. But the two also shared negative texts about Democrats. And a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department due out next Monday is expected to conclude that there was no politically motivated bias against Trump by the FBI during its investigation, sources have told The New York Times.
Page, who left her job 18 months ago, insisted to the Daily Beast that she did nothing wrong in her investigation with Strzok and that she has a legal right to her personal political opinions. She said Trump’s repeated attacks on her are like “being punched in the gut.”