The former FBI counterintelligence deputy chief assigned to oversee the the probe into alleged Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government seemed to suggested it could end in impeachment, according to new phone texts turned over by the FBI.
Peter Strzok, in an email to a top FBI lawyer who he was also involved with, mentioned “impeachment” as he texted about taking the position with former FBI Chief Robert Muller.
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In a text to Lisa Page, the top FBI lawyer and his mistress, he also called the Russia probe historic.
At 12:13 am on May 19, two days after Mueller was appointed to head the investigation, Strzok indicates that initially he didn’t want to take a position on the probe. “My answer is no way,” he texted Page, according to one of several texts provided to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee headed by Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson.
“And then I think…” he tests, “A case which will be in the history books.”
He concluded that while “a million” people simply have staff jobs in the agency, “this is a chance to DO. In maybe the most important case of our lives.”
At the duo text well past midnight, he wrote at 12:41 a.m., “An investigation leading to impeachment?”
The committee is releasing several of the texts and Johnson has expressed concern that in the five months leading to Mueller’s appointment, the texts between the two key figures in the Russia and Hillary Clinton email scandal probe have gone missing. Justice has ordered an investigation into the missing texts.
Johnson highlighted another part of the texts, written up by our Justice correspondent Kelly Cohen here, that the two felt the “odds” are that the Mueller case wouldn’t amount to much.
The two have become the face of the pro-Clinton, anti-Trump agenda in the FBI since Trump became president. Strzok, who had called Trump an “idiot,” was fired after some anti-Trump texts became public.
In the new series, he poured the praise on to Page, who he worked with on the Clinton email case, and who also went to work for Mueller.
“You obviously would excel on the team…in a thousand ways they need someone EXACTLY like you,” he wrote.
Page, apparently being wooed, texted that some woman inside the agency “paid some really outrageous compliments to me.”
How outrageous? She texted, “Something about being the second smartest lawyer she has ever worked with besides [former FBI Director James] Comey. It can’t be true.”
Strzok suggest it is. “You’re in an entirely different class,” he texted. “You see the future. You assimilate and combine things in an uncanny way.”
He added, “Plus you have passion and curiosity, which is more than half of the battle anyway.”
Eventually, Page texted, “We should stop having this conversation here.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com
