Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page continued her image rehabilitation tour on Wednesday with an interview on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, wherein she painted herself as a victim of President Trump, rather than as a casualty of malfeasance within the FBI.
Asked why she was coming forward to speak publicly, she said, “When the president finally did that vile, sort of simulated sex act in a rally in Minneapolis, I just finally had to accept that this isn’t getting better and being quiet isn’t making this go away.”
That “vile, sort of simulated sex act” was really just Trump mocking the romantic text exchanges between Page and Peter Strzok, an FBI agent with whom she had been having an extramarital affair.
But some people are buying into the idea that Trump, whose 2016 campaign was the subject of an unwarranted FBI investigation, is out of line for bringing any of it up at all.
James Gagliano, a conservative-leaning law enforcement analyst for CNN (and Washington Examiner contributor), tweeted shortly after the Page interview that though he believed she and others had damaged the FBI’s reputation, Trump “attacking her” at his rallies was nonetheless “unseemly.”
Believe Lisa Page, et al, have done incalculable damage to image, reputation of FBI.
But, all fallible human beings make mistakes. Most folks’ mistakes never receive national attention, hyper-scrutiny, use by cynical partisans.
POTUS attacking her at rallies remains unseemly.
— James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) December 18, 2019
If Trump were a gratuitous insulter, or even a particularly harsh one, Gagliano and others might have a point. He’s not, but Trump is extraordinarily effective at fighting back against several systems at once, all of which have actively worked to grind him down for the past four years.
True, Trump carries a gargantuan chip on his shoulder. But considering that he’s been targeted for destruction by the national news media, the FBI, the entire Democratic Party, the entire Republican Party (until he won the election), and the permanent Washington bureaucracy, it’s at least somewhat understandable.
He’s mad and responding the only way he can: using the bully pulpit to at least share his side of the story. So what if that means ridiculing his opponents?
For any voter who wanted to send Trump to Washington to scramble the systems that have made it the grotesque mess that it is, this is what that looks like.
Page isn’t a victim of Trump. Like others in those systems that have tried to break Trump, she’s a victim of a disruption that voters asked for.
