Lisa Page responds to ‘vile’ Trump attacks: ‘Being quiet isn’t making this go away’

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page spoke out late Tuesday about how she has been treated, including by President Trump, since her texts with former agent Peter Strzok became public, saying she realized that “being quiet isn’t making this go away.”

Page spoke with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about a week after the Justice Department’s inspector general released the findings of its probe into the bureau’s handling of its investigation into Trump campaign associates in 2016.

The long-awaited report sharply criticized the FBI over its handling of applications to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser, but undercut a GOP talking point in finding that the probe was not motivated by political bias.

Page called the inspector general’s findings “two years too late.”

“It won’t make a difference and it’s two years too late,” she said on MSNBC.  “[Investigators] realized what I’ve known from the beginning which is that my personal views had no impact on the course of either investigation.”

“Two days later, you see Lindsey Graham in the Senate spend 40 minutes reading text messages again,” she added, referring to the Republican senator from South Carolina. “These are three years old. They’ve been described as immaterial ultimately by the inspector general and yet we’re still talking about them.”

Lisa Page comments on DOJ and FBI release of text messages: “There were plenty of ways to fulfill their congressionally mandated oversight responsibility without politicizing our messages” pic.twitter.com/RppB8YQVUh

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 17, 2019

Page in the interview also addressed Trump’s mockery of her and Strzok, including what she described as him acting out a “vile, sort-of simulated sex act” at a recent rally.

She said that this made her realize that she “just finally had to accept it’s not getting better and being quiet isn’t making this go away.”

“At least I have my voice out there, at least, if you want to respond, respond to me instead of this caricature that you’ve drawn up about me,” Page said.

She made similar comments in a recent interview with the Daily Beast, in which she called Trump’s mockery “demeaning” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified last week that his investigation found no bias behind the start of the FBI’s probe into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. 

Trump and his allies have alleged that there was political bias behind the surveillance, and have pointed to texts between Page and Strzok that were critical of Trump.