A top House Republican is calling for a review of communications between more FBI and Justice Department staffers after the revelation that ex-FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged text messages about a “media leak strategy” while Strzok was leading the bureau’s Russia probe.
In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Monday, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said he held “grave concerns regarding an apparent systemic culture of media leaking by high-ranking officials at the FBI and DOJ related to ongoing investigations” after another batch of texts between the pair were provided to Congress.
[Trump: FBI, DOJ doing ‘nothing’ in response to Strzok text on ‘media leak strategy’]
In the letter, Meadows points to an exchange on April 10, 2017, between Strzok and Page, who were having an extramarital affair at the time.
“I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go,” Strzok wrote.
A day later the Washington Post broke the story about how former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page had been surveilled by the FBI following the bureau obtaining a warrant from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before the 2016 election. The warrant has been controversial since it partly relied on the unverified dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
“Evidence suggests senior officials at the FBI and DOJ communicated with other news outlets beyond the Washington Post, as well,” Meadows said Monday. “Our task force continues to receive troubling evidence that the practice of coordinated media interactions continues to exist within the DOJ and FBI. While this activity may be authorized and not part of the inappropriate behavior…, it fails to advance the private march to justice, and as such, warrants your attention to end this practice.”
Meadows, a member of the House Oversight Committee and chairman of the Freedom Caucus, specifically asked for a review of texts and emails from June 2016 to June 2017 between FBI and DOJ officials Stuart Evans, Michael Kortan, and Joseph Pientka, but denies the suggestion of any wrongdoing.
Strzok’s lawyer Aitan Goelman, however, said the term “media leak strategy” in his client’s messages refers to a DOJ-wide initiative to detect and stop aides sharing information with the media.
“The President and his enablers are once again peddling unfounded conspiracy theories to mislead the American People,” Goelman said in a written statement.
Strzok, who was once a special agent, was dismissed from the FBI in August after his heated appearance before House investigators. He told a public joint session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in July that he had not spoken to members of the media while working on the FBI’s inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and possible links between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin, nor when he joined special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia probe in the summer of 2017.
Page, however, reportedly liaised with reporters. As general counsel under former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, she was authorized to speak to the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett in an interview for an October 2016 article about the Clinton investigation. The interactions eventually led to McCabe being fired in March because he was not candid about them to the DOJ’s internal watchdog. Barrett later joined the Post and wrote the April 2017 story about Carter Page.
Texts between Strzok and Page, which showed a bias against President Trump, became a focus of Republican-led complaints in late 2017, raising concerns about there being politically motivated in both the FBI and DOJ.
The DOJ inspector general’s report in June found no proof over the course of a six-month probe that Strzok’s views influenced internal decision-making processes. Strzok, himself, has vehemently pushed back on the allegations.
