Lisa Page Scolds Trump Over Public Attacks: ‘If You Want to Respond, Respond to Me Instead of This Caricature’

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page spoke out about the “vile” personal attacks that have been leveled at her by President Donald Trump, and said that now that she’s got a public forum, “if you want to respond, respond to me.”

Page recently broke her silence with an interview in The Daily Beast, and on Tuesday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, she sat for her first television interview with host Rachel Maddow to discuss the fallout from her involvement in the Trump/Russia and Hillary Clinton investigations.

After playing clips of Fox News hosts and Republican lawmakers snidely invoking her name, Maddow asked Page “Why speak now on your own terms?”

“Honestly I just wasn’t planning to and I didn’t want to, I’ve led an entirely anonymous life and hoped to return to one,” Page said, but added “when the president finally did that vile sort of simulated sex act in a rally in Minneapolis, I just finally had to accept it’s not getting better, and being quiet isn’t making this go away, and it just wasn’t working for me anymore.”

“Since you did the interview with The Daily Beast, and since you opened your public Twitter account and been able to make public statements in that forum, the president has not slowed down,” Maddow noted, and asked “If this doesn’t slow down, the president attacking you, is this still the right thing to do?”

Page replied that although Trump hasn’t slowed down, “At least I have my voice out there, at least, if you want to respond, respond to me, instead of this caricature that you’ve drawn up about me.”

Page also said that the Justice Department’s selective release of private text messages was “really one of the more painful aspects of this entire two years.”

“I mean, the president’s attacks and assaults are one thing, but this is my institution, this is my Justice Department betraying us,” she said, and added “I have been a part of both of these institutions for a long time and I know it looks like when you’re trying to, when the department is trying to protect people and protect information, and I know what it looks like when they’re not. There were plenty of ways to fulfill their congressionally mandated oversight responsibility without politicizing our messages, without shoveling them out in the way that they did.”

Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.

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