Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose spicy text messages with former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok have been the subject of endless mockery from the president, joined MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night to tell her side of the story.





RACHEL MADDOW: You talked about what it was like and sort of how you found out and what your thought process was when you learned that these text messages that had been investigated by the inspector general had not just made their way into public consumption but had actually been given to reporters by the Justice Department who told reporters that they shouldn't source them to the Justice Department and explain where they got them, but it was in fact the DOJ who gave them out.



PAGE: That's correct.



MADDOW: Tell me how that felt?



PAGE: I mean, it's really one of the more painful aspects of these entire two years. I mean, the president's attacks and insults are one thing, but this is my institution, this is my Justice Department betraying us. And, you know, there's an element of -- or at least there's a claim this is congressional oversight and we had to do it.



I have been a part of both of these institutions for a long time, and I know what it looks like when you're trying -- 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.



MADDOW: Why do you think they did it?



PAGE: Well, my speculation is because this was not a great time for the Justice Department. You had Attorney General Sessions constantly beleaguered and being lambasted by the president for failing to sufficiently protect him. You had Rod Rosenstein going to the Hill early the next morning. I think it served a useful foil.

More:Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer who has become a favorite target of Donald Trump as a proxy for the investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia, talks with Rachel Maddow about a text message exchange she was involved in that mentioned an "insurance policy" and "we won't let it happen" in regard to a Trump presidency.Lisa Page, former FBI lawyer, talks with Rachel Maddow about why the investigation of the Donald Trump campaign's ties to Russia was very different from the investigation into Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and why the public heard about Clinton but not Trump before the election.