Fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok helped write the letter notifying Congress that the agency had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, former FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Friday.
“Peter Strzok helped draft my letter to Congress on October 28th that Hillary Clinton blames for her defeat,” Comey told House investigators in a closed-door session, per a transcript released Saturday. “So it’s hard for me to see how he was on Team Clinton secretly at that point in time.”
Strzok’s political views have held a spot near center-stage throughout the public debate over the FBI’s investigations of Clinton and Russian interference in the 2016 elections. He played a key role in the Clinton investigation, which concluded without a recommendation for her indictment, and drafted the memo that launched the counter-intelligence probe into the Russian cyber-attacks against the Democratic party.
But Strzok kept that investigation secret, Comey emphasized, at a time when the revelation would have harmed then-GOP nominee Donald Trump’s presidential prospects.
“[Strzok] was one of the handful of people in the entire world who knew we were investigating four Americans who had some connection to Mr. Trump during the summer of 2016, and he didn’t tell a soul,” Comey said. “So it’s hard to reconcile that with his being on Team Clinton.”
The publicity of that counter-intelligence became a political football in August of 2016, when then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote a letter to Comey that referred to mounting “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government” and the Trump team. He intensified that claim in an October 31 letter, written days after Comey and Strzok drafted and released the letter to Congress about the re-opened Clinton probe.
“In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Reid wrote. “The public has a right to know this information.”
Reid derived such information in part from conversations with then-CIA Director John Brennan, but Comey declined to give them a public airing before Election Day.
“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” Clinton said in May of 2017. “I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off — and the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling [and] persuasive.”
Trump’s team likewise believes that the FBI tried to sabotage his presidency through the Russia investigations, a view that gained traction in part due to text messages between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page that revealed a contemptuous attitude towards the real estate mogul who leads the Republican party. “Trump’s abysmal, hoping people will just dump him,” Strzok wrote in one February of 2016 message.
Trump applauded his firing just a few months ago. “Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the Witch Hunt, will it be dropped? It is a total Hoax,” the president tweeted in August. “Just fired Agent Strzok, formerly of the FBI, was in charge of the Crooked Hillary Clinton sham investigation. It was a total fraud on the American public and should be properly redone!”
Comey defended the integrity of their work, but endorsed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s decision to remove Strzok from the Russia investigation when he learned of the messages.
“When you’re the leader of a justice agency, the appearance of bias is as important as the existence of actual bias,” he told lawmakers. “It’s a reasonable decision by a reasonable leader.”
