Former FBI attorney Lisa Page said in congressional testimony that she and her colleagues disagreed with the decision to allow the aides of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to attend her FBI interview.
Republican Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, released 370 pages of closed-door testimony from Page to his committee in July 2018. One answer from Page that caught people’s attention was a reply to former Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy. (RELATED: Here Is What’s Next For Trey Gowdy)
Gowdy questioned why Clinton’s lawyers were allowed to sit in on her FBI interview when they were potential witnesses, and Page agreed that was odd.
Lisa Page says “we all at the FBI disagreed with” the unusual decision to let Hillary Clinton have Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson present during her questioning, given they were potential fact witnesses. pic.twitter.com/vzcVIeKeDn
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 12, 2019
Page said:
We all at the FBI disagreed with it. And I recall both lawyers for the FBI calling to — calling over to the prosecutors, and I am certain that [Peter Strzok] called over to prosecutors to say, ‘This is BS.’ I’m sure that is probably how he would have phrased it, like ‘Why are they attending?’ And the answer that we received back then was that they did not have the — they didn’t see a legal basis to exclude them from the interview because Secretary Clinton was representing them as lawyers.
Previously released testimony showed that Page expressed the same sentiment during a different portion of the hearing.
“I would agree with you that it is not typically appropriate or operationally necessary to have fact witnesses attend the interview,” she said.