On Tuesday, Business Insider reported that former President Donald Trump is trying to sue a pair of former FBI officials who have been at the center of a number of right-wing conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation — but that he has failed half a dozen times to locate them for service of the lawsuit.
"Former President Donald Trump has been trying since March to serve former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok with a 108-page lawsuit — but hasn't been able to find either of them, according to new court papers," reported Laura Italiano. "Trump 'has attempted service unsuccessfully six (6) times' on both Page and Strzok, with the most recent attempts failing on June 30, his lawyers told a federal judge in Florida."
"The holdup in serving Strzok and Page was revealed in a brief status report on the massive lawsuit, in which Trump accuses lead defendant Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former British Intelligence officer Christopher Steele and some 20 Democrats with a sweeping conspiracy to tie Trump to Russia during the 2016 presidential election," said the report. "It's not clear how, or where, Trump's lawyers have looked for the two, who have maintained a separate, but public, profile since their brief extra-marital affair became front page news in 2017 after the DOJ disclosed their private text communications to reporters."
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Strzok and Page became targets of GOP anger in part because their private text messages appeared to show animus toward then-candidate Trump, while Strzok was part of the Russia investigation.
There remains no evidence that Strzok ever did anything to unduly bias the investigation, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe removed Strzok from the probe when the texts were made public.
Trump has long sought to paint the Russia investigation as a nefarious, politically-motivated plot by the intelligence community to ruin his chances of becoming president. Nothing of the sort has ever been substantiated, and special counsel Robert Mueller's final report on the matter indicated members of Trump's team did indeed seek to collaborate with Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election — although Mueller stopped short of charging anyone with a criminal conspiracy.