Lisa Page Wants Donald Trump to Leave Her Alone

By Rebecca Fishbein  |  December 2, 2019 | 1:35pm
NewsPolitics
Lisa Page Wants Donald Trump to Leave Her Alone
Image: (via Getty)

In October, President Trump publicly mocked former FBI lawyer Lisa Page at a rally in Minneapolis, approximating an orgasm while calling her name on stage. The very gross move was an effort to make fun of her famed text message exchange with then-agent and Russia prober Peter Strzok—not that it was sexy, but they did repeatedly call Trump an idiot, show me the lie—and though Page shunned interviews after news, it seems the fake orgasm changed her mind.

The Daily Beast ran an interview with Page on Sunday night, one that dug into her public silence following the New York Times’s 2017 publication of her texts with Strzok. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Page said, when interviewer Molly Jong-Fast asked why she’s decided to get back in the news. “I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse. It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”

Trump’s spent a lot of time talking about Page, and not just while moaning her name in front of several thousand people. He tweets about her quite a bit, for instance, claiming she worked against him at the behest of the Obama investigation (a favorite conspiracy of his), and in May, he went so far as to accuse her of treason.

Page does not much care for this:

“It’s almost impossible to describe” what it’s like, she told me. “It’s like being punched in the gut. My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”
“But it’s also very intimidating because he’s still the president of the United States. And when the president accuses you of treason by name, despite the fact that I know there’s no fathomable way that I have committed any crime at all, let alone treason, he’s still somebody in a position to actually do something about that. To try to further destroy my life. It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me.”

Trump has a habit of threatening people he believes wronged him, particularly on Twitter, where he can sic his diehards on people like Page. This, she says, has made her life incredibly difficult.

“[W]hen somebody makes eye contact with me on the Metro, I kind of wince, wondering if it’s because they recognize me, or are they just scanning the train like people do? It’s immediately a question of friend or foe?” she told Jong-Fast. “Or if I’m walking down the street or shopping and there’s somebody wearing Trump gear or a MAGA hat, I’ll walk the other way or try to put some distance between us because I’m not looking for conflict.”

She added, “Really, what I wanted most in this world is my life back.”

That’s probably not happening any time soon, though she will at least likely be cleared of any misconduct or wrongdoing re: the leaked texts, thanks to a recent DOJ Inspector General finding that the FBI did not spy on the Trump campaign. Not that this will make it any easier for Page to dodge the MAGA hat crew.

 
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