TRUMP FIRED PETER STRZOK. NOW BIDEN IS DEFENDING THAT DECISION. There have been endless news reports about the Biden Justice Department’s pursuit of former President Donald Trump. There is, of course, the Mar-a-Lago classified documents affair. There is the Jan. 6 investigation. And lately, there have been reports that the department is also investigating some unspecified aspect of Trump’s post-presidential fundraising.
So the current president’s Justice Department is clearly going after his predecessor. That raises some interesting issues and precedents. But there is at least one case — it hasn’t received a lot of attention — in which the Biden DOJ is defending a Trump decision. And the department has just released documents in a lawsuit that shed new light on one of the department’s worst moments of the Trump era.
The case is Strzok v. Garland et al. The “Garland” is Attorney General Merrick Garland. The “Strzok” is Peter Strzok, the disgraced former FBI agent who was fired for his blatant anti-Trump bias during the Trump-Russia investigation. In August 2019, Strzok filed suit against the Justice Department — the case was then known as Strzok v. Barr et al — alleging that he had been wrongfully terminated. “The decision to fire Special Agent Strzok in violation of his constitutional rights was the result of a long and public campaign by President Trump and his allies to vilify Strzok and pressure the [FBI] to terminate him,” the lawsuit said.
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The Justice Department responded that Strzok had demonstrated unacceptably bad judgment in his Trump-hating text conversations with another FBI official, his extramarital girlfriend Lisa Page. This is part of the department’s response, from November 2019, noting that Strzok was so determined to bring down Trump that he decided that doing so was worth giving up a possible promotion:
A Department of Justice Office of Inspector General investigation found that [Strzok] had exchanged over 40,000 texts with [Page] on their government-issued phones, among them texts written in 2016 in which [Strzok] called the president — at that time, still a candidate for president — a “disaster” and suggested that “we’ll stop” him from taking office. And in a text he wrote in 2017 — after the president had taken office and during [Strzok’s] tenure as lead investigator for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team — [Strzok] described his own “sense of unfinished business.” As he wrote to [Page] in that text: “I unleashed it with [the Clinton email investigation]. Now I need to fix it and finish it. … Who gives a f***, one more [assistant director] … [versus] an investigation leading to impeachment?”
The lawsuit dragged on through the end of the Trump administration. Strzok v. Barr became Strzok v. Garland. With the change, the Biden Justice Department could have dropped its opposition to Strzok on the grounds that he was mistreated by the bad old Trump administration. Instead, the department is, so far, defending the decision to fire Strzok, just as it did when Trump was in office.
The news today is that in a new court filing, the Justice Department made public an extraordinary letter, actually a draft of an extraordinary letter, that a top FBI official wrote to Strzok confirming Strzok’s firing. The FBI official who fired Strzok was Deputy Director David Bowdich. When Strzok appealed his dismissal, as was his right, Bowdich reviewed the evidence again. In an Aug. 8, 2018, letter, just released as part of the lawsuit, Bowdich told Strzok that he, Bowdich, had taken another look at the assessments of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility and all the relevant evidence. Bowdich’s decision was that the decision to fire was justified.
“It is difficult to fathom the repeated, sustained errors of judgment you made while serving as the lead agent in two of the most high profile investigations in the country,” Bowdich wrote in the draft. “Your sustained pattern of bad judgment in the use of an FBI device has called into question for many the decisions made during both the Clinton email investigation and the initial stages of the Russian collusion investigation. In short, your repeated selfishness has called into question the credibility of the entire FBI.”
There was more. “In my 23 years in the FBI, I have not seen a more impactful series of missteps which called into question the entire organization and more thoroughly damaged the reputation of the organization,” Bowdich continued. “In our role as FBI employees we sometimes make unpopular decisions, but the public should be able to examine our work and not have to question our motives.” Bowdich concluded that Strzok had inflicted an “extremely damaging impact to the [FBI], which will take years to overcome.”
Bowdich has been deposed as part of the lawsuit. In court papers, the Justice Department included part of what Bowdich said in that deposition:
I looked at those texts over and over and over again, and I was seeing the damage that it was doing to our organization. We had new agent classes coming in on a regular basis, and when FBI agents come into Quantico, it is made crystal clear, crystal clear to them, check your political beliefs at the door. Check your biases at the door. Objectivity is 100% important as an investigative organization. That is something you are taught from the time you are an infant entering the organization. So, I am taking all — all the noise, all that stuff, I try to clear that out completely and really focus on, What is the message that we are sending internally across the board? Because this isn’t a … brand new agent. This is a deputy assistant director with … 20 years of experience, extensive experience in counterintelligence, of all things.
Trump constantly complains about the way he was treated during the Russia investigation. He also complains about the 2020 election. He repeatedly attacks leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY). There are many other grievances. Sometimes, it is tempting to dismiss all of Trump’s complaints as sour grapes. But as far as the Russia investigation is concerned, it is important to remember that the FBI relentlessly pursued Trump starting even before he took office. Special counsel Robert Mueller, for whom Strzok worked before his texts were discovered, knew early on that investigators could not establish that any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign ever occurred. Yet Mueller allowed the investigation to go for another year and a half, meaning the president was under a constant shadow in the Russia matter even though investigators could never determine that a crime had even occurred. That, plus the leaks that happened nearly every day, did enormous damage to the new Trump presidency.
So it is good to remember what the FBI did. Strzok v. Garland is helping us do that.
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