Summer Friday afternoons are the time to watch for the release of news the government must disclose but would prefer that you not notice. So it was on July 26, when the Department of Justice signed and filed court documents settling claims by former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that their rights under the federal Privacy Act had been violated when text messages they exchanged on FBI communication devices in 2016 were disclosed to the press in December 2017. The two received, in the aggregate, $2 million from the settlement.
At the times relevant to the lawsuit, Strzok was one of the FBI’s principal national-security agents — chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section. Page was counsel to the FBI’s deputy director. Both were involved in two investigations that captured headlines at the time: one a criminal investigation involving Hillary Clinton’s storage of confidential information relating to her role as secretary of state on an unauthorized private email server, the other a counterintelligence investigation of allegations that Donald Trump had “colluded” with the Russians — a category unknown to lawyers but familiar to editorial writers. Strzok and Page were also romantically involved well before 2016, but if you have surmised by now that they claimed the texts at issue revealed that relationship, you would be wrong; those texts conveyed nothing about it.
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