Former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page have settled with the Justice Department over alleged privacy rights violations after the release of their disparaging text messages leveraged by former President Trump to challenge the Russia investigation during his presidency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The settlement is still pending finalization and approval from a judge.<\/p>\n
A tentative agreement was filed Tuesday resolving Page\u2019s 5-year-old lawsuit against the FBI for releasing text messages with Strzok \u2014 with whom she had an affair \u2014 that were critical of the former president. Strzok\u2019s lawsuit seeking back pay and reinstatement remains unsettled.<\/p>\n
Page sought $1,000 in compensation following the leak of her text messages to the media. Additional details about the settlement were not immediately available.<\/p>\n
In 2019, Strzok argued in a court filing in Washington, D.C., federal district court that his politically charged anti-Trump messages were protected by the First Amendment even though he sent them on bureau-issued phones while playing leading roles in the probes into both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Strzok, once the FBI\u2019s head of counterintelligence, said he was entitled to \u2018develop a full factual record through discovery,\u2019 and that it would be premature to dismiss the case at this early stage.\u00a0He went on to argue that the DOJ\u2019s position would \u2018leave thousands of career federal government employees without protections from discipline over the content of their political speech.\u2019<\/p>\n
Page also filed suit against the FBI and Department of Justice, alleging the government\u2019s publication of her salacious text messages with Strzok constituted a breach of the Federal Privacy Act.<\/p>\n
Page\u2019s complaint also sought reimbursement for \u2018the cost of childcare during and transportation to multiple investigative reviews and appearances before Congress,\u2019 the \u2018cost of paying a data-privacy service to protect her personal information\u2019 and attorney\u2019s fees.<\/p>\n
In a later filing, according to CNN, Strzok\u2019s lawyers wrote that the defendants \u2018should not be heard to complain about the notoriety and putative damage to the FBI\u2019s reputation from Strzok\u2019s speech when it was their own illegal disclosures, magnified and distorted by the false attacks made by the President and his allies, that placed a spotlight on Strzok\u2019s opinions.\u2019<\/p>\n
The two were involved in the FBI\u2019s initial counterintelligence investigation into\u00a0Russian meddling\u00a0and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016\u00a0election and later served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s team.<\/p>\n
In 2020, the spotlight was on the lovers\u2019 scandal during a live performance titled \u2018FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers\u2019 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which was based on the anti-Trump text messages shared between the former agents. Trump has called the couple the \u2018FBI lovebirds\u2019 during his rallies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fox News\u2019 Gregg Re and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.<\/p>\n\n
Former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page have settled with the Justice Department over alleged privacy rights violations after the release of their disparaging text messages leveraged by former President Trump to challenge the Russia investigation during his presidency.\u00a0 The settlement is still pending finalization and approval from a judge. A tentative agreement was <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":19798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}