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STRZOK STRETCHES THE TRUTH. Disgraced FBI official Peter Strzok has written a book about his role in the investigations targeting President Trump and the Trump campaign. And passages in the book, and also in Strzok’s recent interviews, make it easy to understand why Strzok was fired for his infamous anti-Trump texts with then-girlfriend Lisa Page, another former FBI official.
Start with the beginning. On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Strzok claimed that the FBI’s infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation did not target Donald Trump or his campaign. “When we opened cases commonly known as Crossfire Hurricane, those were not looking at the president,” Strzok said. “They were not looking at his campaign. They were looking at a very discrete set of individuals based on an allegation we had received that Russia had offered to coordinate the release of information to help the Trump campaign.”
But who were those “discrete” individuals? They were Paul Manafort, who just happened to be head of the Trump campaign. Michael Flynn, who just happened to be the Trump campaign’s top national security adviser. Carter Page, who just happened to be a low-level Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. And George Papadopoulos, who also just happened to be a low-level Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.
How is investigating four Trump campaign officials, including two of the campaign’s highest-ranking officials, not investigating the Trump campaign? Strzok does not have an answer to that, because the FBI clearly was investigating the Trump campaign — even as it claimed it was not.
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ON HIS MOST NOTORIOUS TEXT, STRZOK SUFFERS AMNESIA. On NBC, Strzok said, “I certainly regret sending the text messages that were absolutely weaponized and used to bludgeon the work of the FBI, the work of the FBI special counsel.” But if you read his book, you’ll see that he claims not to remember writing the most troubling of those texts — the one that made the Justice Department inspector general wonder whether Strzok really was out to get Trump.
The text was from August 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign. Page texted to Strzok, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right?” and Strzok responded, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” Stop it? How? Remember, Strzok at that very moment was investigating the Trump campaign (no matter what he says now). The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, concluded that “the messages raised serious questions about the propriety of any investigative decisions in which Strzok and Page played a role.” Any decisions. That was a pretty damning assessment.
But Strzok says he remembers nothing about it. Really. In his book, Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump, Strzok writes that “To this day I still do not remember writing” the “We’ll stop it” text. But he does remember that it was written “days after Trump’s repeated attacks on the immigrant family of Humayun Khan, an army captain who gave his life for our country when he was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004.” And he does remember that at the time Trump “was proving to be a crass, racist, misogynistic force in our national politics.” And he does remember that Trump “radically undermined our national security commitments to NATO and the world.”
But Strzok claims he has absolutely no memory, none whatsoever, of writing that he, and perhaps the rest of the FBI, would “stop” Trump before he could become president.
Strzok’s I-don’t-remember claim is part of a general re-litigating of the Trump-Russia affair that is happening in the final weeks before the election. Strzok and many anti-Trump allies are arguing that collusion — the theory that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election — really did happen, despite special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that he could not establish that collusion ever occurred, much less who might have been involved in it. Now, Strzok and others are making excuses for Mueller, arguing that collusion was real, even though Mueller — who had all the resources and powers of U.S. law enforcement — couldn’t find it.
Strzok’s claims and others like it make it doubly important to remember what really happened. And fortunately, there is another book that gives the inside story of the Mueller investigation and how Democrats on Capitol Hill sought to use the special counsel’s findings to remove the president — and how, failing that, they turned to the Ukraine matter to try to accomplish the same thing. It is called Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump, and it is filled with never-before-told stories about the investigation. I hope you’ll give it a look.
