The FBI recently fired one of its top agents, 22-year veteran Peter Strzok, at the end of an internal disciplinary process that revealed Strzok’s extramarital affair with a fellow FBI employee as well as expressions of animus toward Donald Trump. Strzok had headed the investigation into Russian interference after running the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server, in the process becoming a target for Trump supporters who suggested that Strzok’s actions were biased against the president.
Immediately after Strzok’s lawyer announced his client had been fired, a group of “friends” of Strzok established a GoFundMe crowdsourcing page that claimed to be raising money to pay for the disgraced agent’s legal fees and lost income. Donations flowed in, with the page raising more than double its initial $150,000 goal. As of Thursday morning, more than $400,000 has been raised on Strzok’s behalf.
In the page’s description, Strzok’s friends describe him as a “proud husband” (said of a man who cheated on his wife with a married co-worker) and blame “political pressure” for his sacking. A number of media outlets are cited as testimonials, including a piece from this magazine: “The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative magazine, declared that the ‘overwrought tale of bias’ surrounding Pete is ‘just sound and fury.’”
There’s a problem: It’s not exactly what the piece in question declared, which explains why the GoFundMe page doesn’t link to the original. You can read the full post, which I wrote and published last month, here. The “overwrought tale of bias” refers broadly to the tale told by some House Republicans that attempted to indict the entire FBI and, ipso facto, the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign. I do not dispute, and in fact argue for, Strzok’s own personal bias against Trump. Here’s the concluding paragraph that Strzok’s friends selectively quoted:
The entire episode is like when a movie studio plucks a single phrase out of a negative review and slaps it on their ads. Maybe the best entry in the genre is a very mixed Entertainment Weekly review of the 1995 movie Se7en which said that the credit sequence, at least, was a “small masterpiece of dementia.” New Line—which distributed the film—then ran ads claiming that Entertainment Weekly called Se7en “a masterpiece.” This is a lot like that, actually.
The article Strzok’s friends quote is in reality an analysis of the long hearing conducted jointly by the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, and it hardly exonerates Strzok. After criticizing Strzok for the bad judgment he exhibited, both professionally and personally, I turned to the event in question. The hearing, led by Republicans, ought to have sought to demonstrate how Strzok’s biases against Trump led to a corrupted process at the FBI surrounding the ongoing investigation into Russian interference and possible Trump campaign involvement. That is, after all, what many of those GOP members have alleged in cable news hits ever since Strzok’s text messages were first revealed.
But it simply is not sufficient to say that Strzok hates Trump and wished he lost the 2016 election. What would rise to a level of actual scandal is if the FBI as an institution had been corrupted, where decisions to pursue or drop investigations were driven by the political views of top officials and not on the basis of evidence. That’s a big, serious charge.
And the hearings did not demonstrate this charge. At all. The questions, even from serious interrogators like Trey Gowdy, focused on rehashing what we already knew: that Strzok said nasty things about Trump supporters, that he expressed his outrage at Trump himself, and that he wished for Trump’s defeat at the ballot box. It’s worth noting these were private messages between Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, that were only made public because of the internal investigation into their improper personal relationship. Wise leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department ought to have recognized that Strzok, with those biases, should not be in charge of high-profile political investigations. And, in fact, special counsel Robert Mueller kicked Strzok off his investigation once he learned about them.
But were the actions of the Russia investigation itself corrupted by Strzok’s personal biases? If they were, then Republicans haven’t even come close to showing it, let alone proving it. Instead, the findings of the Mueller investigation so far include charges of violations of foreign agent registration law, tax evasion, lying to federal investigators, stand on their own. Any further charges (or the exonerations of President Trump and his campaign) likewise stand on their own.
