Former FBI agent Peter Strzok snapped at colleague Lisa Page in a spat over not being included in an email distribution list.
The exchange between Strzok and Page, an FBI lawyer who reportedly carried on an extramarital affair with Strzok, was revealed in emails obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
On April 27, 2017, Page reacted to a Judicial Watch release that found former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was targeted the prior year by a federal grand jury in an effort to obtain further information about her private email server.
Page sent a reply email to an official in the Office of General Counsel saying, “I didn’t realize that we had said this publicly.”
She then appeared to get into an argument with Strzok. “Are you serious, dude? I sent to [redacted]. So I’ve committed some grave sin for not including you on this? My apologies, DAD Strzok, sir,” Page said, referring to his role as deputy assistant director.
Strzok shot back, “You know what? Take a step back and look at this… And stop with the DAD Sir bullsh*t. That’s not the point and you know it.”
Page called on Strzok to calm down.
“I think you think you should take your own advice. I didn’t look to see who was on the distribution when I sent it. Sorry, that’s on me. But this is distinctly not a big deal. And I definitely didn’t err in not including you on a two-line email to [redacted]. Get a grip,” she said.
Both Strzok and Page, who are no longer with the FBI, have been a focus of GOP investigators concerned about potential bias within the Justice Department and FBI.
Strzok was the lead investigator of the Clinton emails inquiry and opened the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.
Text messages between Strzok and Page, in which they displayed a negative opinion of Trump, were uncovered over the course of the Justice Department’s inspector general investigation into the Justice Department and FBI’s conduct during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server. Upon the discovery of these texts, Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and was later fired from the bureau.
The emails obtained by Judicial Watch were released in response to a May 21 court order by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to the FBI to process 13,000 pages of records, stemming from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking access to communications between Strzok and Page.
Other emails unveiled by Judicial Watch show FBI officials scrambling to correct the record after then-Director James Comey provided inaccurate testimony about a top aide to Clinton and a New York Times reporter feeding information about Jared Kushner meeting with Russians to the FBI.
“These new Page-Strzok emails show the Obama FBI to be a mess both professionally and ethically,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The best example of the ethical morass at the FBI are the emails showing how a report on Judicial Watch’s disclosure that a grand jury had been used in the Clinton email investigation set off a spat between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.”
