House Judiciary Committee members released the transcript of former FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s testimony in front of the committee last year and it contained several major revelations.
One of the biggest revelations was that Page, who was having an affair with then-FBI agent Peter Strzok, said that the infamous “insurance policy” text message was referring to the Russia investigation.
“During her interview with the Judiciary Committee in July 2018, Page was questioned at length about that text — and essentially confirmed this referred to the Russia investigation while explaining that officials were proceeding with caution, concerned about the implications of the case while not wanting to go at ‘total breakneck speed’ and risk burning sources as they presumed Trump wouldn’t be elected anyway,” Fox News reported. “Further, she confirmed investigators only had a ‘paucity’ of evidence at the start.”
Page and Strzok, who both hated then-candidate Donald Trump and were pro-Hillary Clinton, were involved in the FBI’s initial counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.
In an August 15, 2016 text message, Strzok texted Page: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in [deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe’s] office that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40…”
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote the following about the text message when it was released in December 2017:
This looks an awful lot like motivation for launching an investigation into Trump in order to sink Trump as a hedge against Trump’s victory. The FBI’s investigation into Russian governmental interference in the election began in July 2016, just weeks before Strzok’s text message. And that means that there is now more of a smoking gun of FBI corruption against Trump than there is of Trump colluding with Russia.
Page also indicated that the decision to not charge Clinton with felony gross negligence in her email scandal came at the direction of the Obama Justice Department.
“We did not blow over gross negligence. We, in fact and, in fact, the Director because on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there’s a potential here for this to be the charge,” Page said. “And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence.”
Page continued: “And the Justice Department’s assessment was that it was both constitutionally vague, so that they did not actually feel that they could permissibly bring that charge, and also that it had either never been done or had only been done once like 99 years ago. And so they did not feel that they could sustain a charge.”
“When you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: ‘You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) said to Page.
“That’s correct,” Page responded.
Ratcliffe tweeted out an excerpt of Page’s testimony, writing: “Lisa Page confirmed to me under oath that the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information.”