President Donald Trump criticized former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and his mistress, former FBI attorney Lisa Page, on Sept. 13 as an “embarrassment” to the FBI and DOJ, after newly leaked text messages between the two showed that government officials were “leaking like mad” to damage the president.
One exchange, dated Dec. 15, 2016, shows that Strzok and Page were intimately familiar with an upcoming New York Times article.
“Oh, remind me to tell you tomorrow about the times doing a story about the rnc [sic] hacks,” Page wrote to Strzok.
“And more than they already did? I told you Quinn told me they pulling out all the stops on some story.” Strzok replied.
“Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad. Scorned and worried, and political, they’re kicking into overdrive,” Strzok wrote in a follow-up message.
By “sisters,” Strzok likely referred to any of the other intelligence agencies in the Intelligence Community.
Less than a week prior to the texts, The New York Times cited “senior administration officials” to report that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia interfered in the election to harm Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and promote Trump.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) received new Strzok-Page messages from the DOJ inspector general and forwarded the batch to Congress in mid-August, according to a DOJ spokesperson.
The FBI fired Strzok in August. Page left the bureau in May.
Strzok was the lead agent in two of the biggest investigations in the United States in the run-up to the 2016 election: the probe of Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private email server to conduct government business and the counterintelligence probe into allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Strzok and Page worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team once it took over the Russia investigation. Mueller removed Strzok from the investigation after seeing texts where Strzok expressed intense bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton.