Lisa Page, the senior FBI official who left the bureau after her anti-Trump texts during the 2016 presidential campaign became the subject of press reporting and an internal Justice Department investigation, says she will soon join a tech company as an in-house counsel dealing with law enforcement and national security issues.
Page declined to identify the company during an hourlong appearance on the podcast In Lieu of Fun, hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes and St. John’s University law professor Kate Klonick. Page said the tech firm is “a really cool company, and they do really neat things,” but that at the moment, she does not want to burden her new employers with the controversy that might come from a public announcement of her hiring.
Page also announced that she has left MSNBC, where she was hired as a commentator in June 2020.
Whatever changes in her professional life, Page made clear that she knows she is likely not finished with investigations of the FBI’s pursuit of the Trump campaign that started in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign. “Nothing’s over for me,” she said. “Lindsey Graham still has the Senate, Durham still hasn’t interviewed me.” Page was referencing Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has vowed to continue investigating the FBI’s Trump inquiry (if the GOP retains control of the Senate), and special counsel John Durham, who is reportedly focusing on the FBI in his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
It is fair to say that Graham and Durham were not popular figures with the In Lieu of Fun group. At one point in the podcast, Wittes asked if Page had any New Year’s message for Durham or Graham. Page thought for a moment and said simply, “No.” At that point, Klonick, suggesting how Page might respond, said, “You can subpoena me for my New Year’s message” and gave the finger to the camera. Page, watching, smiled and laughed.
The Durham and Graham investigations came up again, improbably, during a discussion of what Page has been doing with her time in the final months of 2020. Page explained that she has gone off Twitter, been meditating every day, and has organized her clothes. “My clothing drawers had gotten out of hand,” she said, “and now they are beautiful.”
That led Page to discuss her extensive collection of suits. The FBI has a very conservative clothing culture, she noted, and she wore a suit to work every day. Over the years, she accumulated dozens of suits. They became part of her identity as an FBI official. But that came to an end with her departure from the bureau in 2018. “Six months after leaving the FBI, I looked at my gigantic closet full of suits, and I was like, ‘OK, I don’t need all of these any more,” Page said. She resolved to get rid of some. She threw out several on her own, then asked a friend to help her get rid of the 20-something suits that remained. “At the end of it all, I have one suit,” she said proudly. “I have one suit in my closet.”
That is where Durham and Graham came in. “Any more, even if I get called to Congress, or Durham, or whatever, like I’m not wearing a full-on suit for you motherf—ers,” Page said. “Like, f— you. Like, I’m going to wear whatever I damn well please.”
Page’s FBI career was ended by the controversy over anti-Trump texts she exchanged with Peter Strzok, the senior FBI official with whom she was having an extramarital affair. The most concerning occurred on Aug. 8, 2016, when Page texted Strzok to say, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right?” and Strzok answered, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz wrote that “the messages raised serious questions about the propriety of any investigative decisions in which Strzok and Lisa Page played a role.”
Strzok claims he has no memory of writing the text. “In a text that to this day I still do not remember writing, late at night I wrote, ‘We will stop it,'” Strzok recounted in his memoir. “It was an artless comment but conveyed my firm belief that Trump … would not be chosen by the American people to become president.” For her part, Page told House investigators in 2018 that both she and Strzok brought great integrity to their work and would not have used their authority for political purposes. Page also said that at the time in 2016, she was very upset by candidate Donald Trump’s statements about Khizr Kahn, the Gold Star father who had attacked Trump from the stage at the Democratic National Convention. Strzok’s “No we’ll stop it” was “simply an attempt to comfort me,” Page testified.
Now, with Durham and possibly Graham seeking to interview her, Page could face even more questions about those texts and the larger Trump-Russia investigation. But unlike before, she is now free to speak publicly, and anyone who listens to In Lieu of Fun knows precisely what she thinks about the matter.
