Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page – a.k.a. the homewrecker – is suing the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ), claiming that the government’s publication of her salacious text messages with her lover, the married anti-Trump fire and disgraced former BI agent Peter Strzok, constituted a breach of the Federal Privacy Act.
I don’t know. It seems to me that when you send text messages on government devices, which are owned by American people, you have no privacy. In the public sector, courts have ruled that employees who use business-owned devices have no expectation of privacy, because it’s not their personal, private device.
In the complaint filed on Tuesday, the 39-year-old Page said she suffered numerous damages because of the disclosure, including a “permanent loss of earning capacity due to reputational damage” and “the cost of therapy to cope with unwanted national media exposure and harassment” at the hands of President Trump.
First of all, she is the one who damaged her own reputation by the very text message conversations she’s suing the government over.
Secondly, doing a bit on stage at a rally on someone who was involved in the nations’s first attempted government coup isn’t harassment. It’s cathartic.
Page is also seeking reimbursement for “the cost of childcare during and transportation to multiple investigative reviews and appearances before Congress,” and the “cost of paying a data-privacy service to protect her personal information,” and attorney’s fees.
Are you kidding me? How about all of the people in the Trump administration who were dragged through the mud to go testify before Democrats, multiple times, over a Russian collusion hoax, knowing the entire time they were being setup for a perjury trap? Where’s their compensation for attorney’s fees, and costs for protecting themselves? Many of them received death threats, and all over a made up story that Page took a role in pulling off.
Get this. Page claims that on December 12, 2017 DOJ and/or FBI officials disclosed” her sensitive text messages “directly to a select group of reporters to ensure they would become public.” She stated that after court discovery, she can prove that senior officials knew they were violating the law, and that their conduct was “willful and intentional.”
Well, welcome to the other side of the Deep State, sweetie. For the first two years of the Trump presidency the Resistance leaked information nearly every day to the press. Trump’s tax returns were leaked. Other sensitive information was leaked just to harm the president, and in turn harm our country.
Page has a lot of gall to make this claim after what she and her band of mutineers did during and after the 2016 election in an effort to help Hillary Clinton win and Donald Trump lose.
Page had intimate knowledge of the so-called “insurance policy” to take down Trump should he win. That was exposed by Strzok when texted back his response to Page asking him Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?”
Among the 50,000 plus text messages was a July 2016 message Page sent to Strzok, “She [Hillary Clinton] just has to win now. I’m not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump.” Within days, the FBI began investigating candidate Trump’s supposed connections to Russia, all of which were bogus.
After Trump made a joke at a presidential debate concerning his hand size, Page wrote, “This man cannot be president.” Strzok, meanwhile, called Trump a “douche,” insulted Trump supporters, and said he was “scared.”
These are high level FBI personnel.
Page’s lawsuit lamented that Trump’s tweets about her texts “have been retweeted and favorited millions of times.” Trump, Page went on, has “targeted” her “by name in more than 40 tweets and dozens of interviews, press conferences, and statements from the White House, fueling unwanted media attention that has radically altered her day-to-day life.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1201563617180733440?s=20
From Fox News:
She argued that federal law prevents agencies from disclosing personal records about individuals “unless an exception applies or the individual who is the subject of the record consents in writing to the disclosure.”
Page’s lawsuit claimed that there was no public-interest justification for the government’s leak, given that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was already reviewing the texts and later found “no evidence of bias affecting investigative decisions it reviewed, including matters in which Ms. Page was involved.” Page asserted that the government leakers were trying to gain favor with Trump.
However, Horowitz noted in an initial report last year that Strzok and Page’s anti-Trump texts were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” He did not conclude definitively that Page and Strzok’s actions were free from bias — only that he did not have evidence to tie bias to specific investigative actions.
In a separate bombshell report issued Monday, Horowitz extensively faulted the FBI’s secretive efforts to surveil a former Trump aide, which involved both Page and Strzok.
We reported that as part of the DOJ’s rejection of Strzok’s request to be reinstated in the FBI, the department pointed to evidence that Strzok’s wife got hold of his phone, and that’s how she found out he was having an affair with Page. This is an important piece of information, because it demonstrates that Strzok conducted FBI business on iMessage on his personal devices, but then insisted his phone was secure and that he “double deleted” sensitive materials on his phone. That can be argued as a violation of the Espionage Act, section (f), to have any document outside of government custody, and doing FBI work on a personal device is no better than what Strzok allowed Hillary Clinton to get away with concerning her private email server when he threw that investigation.
“[My wife] has my phone. Read an angry note I wrote but didn’t send you. That is her calling from my phone. She says she wants to talk to [you]. Said we were close friends nothing more,” one of Strzok’s text to Page read, according to the DOJ’s filing. So, he told his wife a lie and asked Page to conspire with him. These are really upstanding people, eh?
“Your wife left me a vm [voicemail],” Page texted back. “Am I supposed to respond? She thinks we’re having an affair. Should I call and correct her understanding? Leave this to you to address?”
Strzok then wrote, “I don’t know. I said we were […] close friends and nothing more. She knows I sent you flowers, I said you were having a tough week.”
Strzok’s wife also found photographs and a hotel reservation “ostensibly” used for a “romantic encounter,” the DOJ said.
Page’s suit will more-than-likely face a challenge from the government. The SCOTUS has already ruled that Privacy Act lawsuits against the government for mental and emotional distress are fair game and not covered under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
The point that should be made is that there is no privacy on government devices, or personal devices that you conduct government business.
