Lisa Page Calls Out Barr and Pompeo for Their Silence Amid Trump Attacks
“You know, we can’t control what the president says, but sure as the day is long Attorney General Barr could say something about whether this was appropriate or not.”
Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page took Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr to task on Tuesday night for remaining silent while President Donald Trump publicly trashes their employees.
Weeks after Page broke her public silence to The Daily Beast, explaining that the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was Trump acting out a “demeaning fake orgasm” while calling her name, the longtime target of the president’s attacks gave her first television interview to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
After reiterating that the president’s “vile sort of simulated sex act” at an October rally prompted her to no longer stay quiet, Page—whose text messages with former FBI agent Peter Strzok has fueled Trump’s “deep state” conspiracies for two years now—came to the defense of other public servants attacked by Trump.
“One of the things that’s happened over the course of these past couple of years is that you’ve been sort of this apogee point in terms of the way the president and his supporters in conservative media have gone after you,” Maddow noted. “But we’ve also seen different iterations of it against other civil servants and career public servants, people like Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and others who have popped up in the impeachment investigation as fact witnesses.”
“I wonder if that, too has sort of inflected your feeling about any of this or if you have anything you’d like to say in terms of how they’ve been treated?”
Saying that she feels the president’s actions have been “deeply unfair,” Page added that this is simply “not how public servants should be treated,” even if you think they've committed wrongdoing.
“And moreover, those institutions should be coming to their defense,” she continued. “You know, we can’t control what the president says, but sure as the day is long Attorney General Barr could say something about whether this was appropriate or not. Secretary Pompeo could say something about whether these people deserved the lambasting that they’ve gotten.”