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'I decided to take my power back': Ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page speaks out on Trump's 'sickening' attacks

William Cummings

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page has tried to avoid the media spotlight since gaining national attention for her text messages with fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, which President Donald Trump and his allies have used as evidence of a "deep state" conspiracy to undermine his presidency.

But in a rare interview, Page, 39, told The Daily Beast that she could no longer silently stomach the president's attacks on her. She said "the straw that broke the camel’s back" came when Trump repeatedly called her name at an Oct. 11 rally in Minneapolis in what she described as a "demeaning fake orgasm" while mocking her and Strzok, who were engaged in an extramarital affair.

"I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse," she says. "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."

"I'm done being quiet," she said Sunday night in a tweet linking to the Daily Beast interview.

Page, who left the FBI in May 2018, said "it's almost impossible to describe" the feeling of being repeatedly attacked by Trump.

"It's like being punched in the gut. 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 told The Daily Beast.

"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," she added.

"It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me."

Trump last tweeted about Page on Nov. 15 after his longtime associate Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. He decried the fact that Stone was headed to jail when Page, Strzok and others, including his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, went free.

But despite Trump's insinuations, investigations have not shown Page, Strzok, Clinton or any of the others accused by Trump are guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.

In a June 2018 report, the Justice Department inspector general's office said it was "deeply troubled" by the anti-Trump texts between Page and Strzok – who was fired from the FBI in August 2018 – but "did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions" they made in the probe of Clinton's use of a private email server

A new report from the Justice Department inspector general on the origin of the investigations into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election is scheduled for release on Dec. 9. And Page can expect her name to appear in that report as well.

But Page said even if the OIG report clears her of any wrongdoing, she doesn't expect her vilification among Trump's supporters to end.

"While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people," she told The Daily Beast. "The president has a very loud megaphone."

In their texts, Page and Strzok made several comments that were disparaging of Trump and supportive of Clinton. In the text exchange most often cited as evidence of their bias against Trump, Page asks Strzok to assure her that Trump is "not ever going to become president, right?"

"No. No he won't. We'll stop it," Strzok replied.

Page said she had been inaccurately depicted by a "cherry-picked selection of my texts" and did not remember the messages about Trump when she first learned her texts were being investigated.

Page's marriage survived but she compared the impact of experience to post-traumatic stress disorder but said it is worse "because it's not over. It’s ongoing. It’s not a historical event that is being relived. It just keeps happening."

"I don’t ever know when the president’s going to attack next," she said. "And when it happens, it can still sort of upend my day. You don’t really get used to it."