WASHINGTON -- Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page sued the bureau and the Justice Department on Tuesday, saying officials unlawfully released a trove of politically charged text messages she exchanged with a senior FBI agent with whom she was having an affair.
Page accused the agencies of violating the Privacy Act by showing reporters a document containing nearly 400 texts between her and former senior FBI agent Peter Strzrok, in which the pair discussed their intense dislike of President Donald Trump and fear that he might win the presidency.
The messages, which came to light in December 2017, fueled claims that the FBI was biased against Trump.
Page's lawsuit said the attention has "radically altered her day-to-day life."
"The officials who authorized the disclosure and their allies sought to use, and ultimately did use, the messages to promote the false narrative that Plaintiff and others at the FBI were biased against President Trump, had conspired to undermine him, and otherwise had engaged in allegedly criminal acts, including treason," Page's complaint read.
A Justice Department representative declined to comment on the case.
The lawsuit comes as Page has for the first time publicly pushed back against the president's broadsides after remaining quiet about the political firestorm that engulfed her roughly two years ago. Last week, she gave a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Beast in which she slammed Trump for his "sickening" attacks against her and said she wanted to "take my power back."
Responding to the interview, Trump fired off a critical tweet referring to Page as "the lover of Peter Strzok."
Page's lawsuit was filed a day after the Justice Department's inspector general released a report rebutting accusations that top FBI officials were driven by bias in their investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.
Page and Strzok were key players in that investigation, as well as the probe of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government work while she was secretary of state.
While working on those matters, the two used work phones to swap messages criticizing numerous politicians, including Trump, whom they called an "idiot." In August 2016, after Page wrote that Trump was "not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Strzok responded: "No. No he's not. We'll stop it."
The Justice Department inspector general later compiled the texts as part of a larger body of documents it reviewed in its bias investigation.
In her lawsuit, Page said the release of the text messages with Strzok was intended to elevate the department's standing with Trump at a time when the president was lambasting the department and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Officials allowed reporters to review the messages privately and instructed them not to reveal the department as the source, the lawsuit says.
"This clandestine approach is inconsistent with the disclosure of agency records for transparency purposes or to advance the public interest," the lawsuit read.
A Section on 12/11/2019