Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified last year that top officials in the bureau expressed bias against Hillary Clinton while she was being investigated for her emails.
The claim, part of newly released transcripts from private testimony in front of a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in July 2018, contrasts with the prevailing concern among some conservatives that there has been an anti-Trump tilt in the upper levels of the Justice Department and FBI.
“I am aware of senior FBI officials talking to subordinate FBI officials on the Hillary Clinton investigative team who unquestionably had anti-Hillary sentiment, but who also said: You have to get her or — again, I don’t have an exact quote — but like we’re counting on you, you know,” Page said.
Page was being grilled by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who asked how these subordinate officials would respond.
“My guess is they just probably parried and said: Just follow the facts, ma’am/sir. It’s a challenging place to be put in, I would say,” she replied.”
Page identified two top officials who displayed this anti-Clinton bias at the behest of Jackson Lee.
“My understanding, and I was never a personal witness to this, but this is what I’ve been told, was that at various times Sandy Kable (ph), who was an early executive in the case, as well as Randy Coleman, who at one point was the AD of the Counterintelligence Division, had both made comments to that effect.”
Charles Kable IV, also known as “Sandy,” was a counterintelligence agent working on the case investigating Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email server during her time as secretary of state. Randy Coleman is the former assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
Page testified last year that officials in the bureau, including then-FBI Director James Comey, discussed Espionage Act charges against Hillary Clinton, citing “gross negligence,” but the Justice Department shut them down.
Page is the former FBI lawyer who reportedly carried out an affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigator in the Clinton investigation. The thousands of text messages that they sent back and forth about the Clinton and Trump-Russia investigations raised questions of bias, and Mueller eventually removed Strzok from the special counsel investigation. Strzok was also fired by the FBI.
It was Strzok who reportedly changed the language in Comey’s draft statement from “grossly negligent” in an earlier draft to “extremely careless” in the final statement Comey used when he declined to recommend charges against Clinton in a press conference on July 5, 2016.
Jackson Lee also asked Page if there was a “deep state conspiracy” to stop Trump from being elected. Page said the FBI was an “extraordinarily conservative organization” and “the notion that there’s a deep state conspiracy about anything is laughable.”
