“Targeted for retribution”: Trump’s brag badly backfires as judge orders him to sit for deposition

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that two former FBI officials can depose former President Donald Trump as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit after he bragged about firing them.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two former FBI officials that were part of special counsel Bob Mueller’s team before they were targeted by Trump over text messages disparaging his 2016 candidacy, will be allowed to depose Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray for up to two hours as part of their lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled, according to Politico.

But Jackson left open the question of whether President Joe Biden will invoke executive privilege over any aspects of Trump’s testimony, asking the Justice Department to respond within a month on what Biden plans to do.

Jackson, an Obama appointee, also stressed that she has not yet considered all potential objections from Trump and Wray, which “could include arguments by Trump that he has the unilateral right as a former president to assert executive privilege,” according to Politico.

Strzok and Page argue that they were “illegally targeted for retribution,” according to The Washington Post. Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent, is seeking backpay and reinstatement. Page, a former FBI lawyer, sued the bureau and the DOJ for releasing a trove of her messages that showed she was having an affair with Strzok at the time.

The FBI and the Justice Department have both claimed that Trump did not play a role in their firing but Jackson’s order came after Trump bragged about having the pair fired. Strzok’s lawyers earlier this month cited Trump’s interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt to push for the deposition.

“Don’t forget, these guys, before I even got in, they were spying on my campaign, long before I got in,” Trump told Hewitt on Feb. 2, according to the filing. “This didn’t just happen. And if I didn’t fire Comey, and if I didn’t fire McCabe and Strzok and Page and all of that scum that was in there, you would have had, they were trying to do an overthrow. And they, just think of it. They spied on my campaign from the time I came down the escalator. And here I am, innocently running to do something great, and I have this garbage that’s in there headed up by Comey and the group. They spied on my campaign, and I got rid of them all. I got rid of them all.”

Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe said that Jackson was “right” to rule that Trump and Wray can be questioned.

“It’s called the rule of law,” he tweeted.

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Trump has repeatedly attacked Strzok and Page, arguing that their private messages criticizing him showed that the FBI probe into his campaign’s ties to Russia was biased, though independent reviews have failed to support the former president’s claims.

Jackson’s order also came after Strzok and Page showed that they had finished their interviews with lower-ranking officials and exhausted potential sources of information other than Trump and Wray.

Strzok in his lawsuit argued that the Trump administration tolerated political speech by federal employees only if it praised the former president or attacked his opponents. His complaint argues that his firing was part of a “broader campaign against the very principle of free speech” by Trump.

Strzok argued that other FBI employees did not receive discipline for criticizing Hillary Clinton and alleged that his firing was the “direct result of unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies on Capitol Hill.”