Former FBI General Counsel James Baker said he is not aware of any illegal behavior by former FBI agent Peter Strzok.
During an interview Friday on MSNBC, Baker countered President Trump’s claim that certain leaders in the bureau, including Strzok, committed “treason” by trying to “take down” his campaign.
“I was there. There was no conspiracy. There was no effort to engage in treason, a coup d’état, what ever term you want to use. There was just none of that,” Baker told host Chuck Todd.
Asked if Strzok did anything illegal, Baker, who resigned from the FBI last year, said: “Not to my knowledge.”
“I have not been made aware of any evidence that Pete violated the law — Pete or Lisa [Page], or anybody else violated the law in that regard, with respect to the investigation,” he said. “I didn’t see anything that I thought was politically motivated in terms of actions or missions on their part.”
Strzok was the lead investigator of the Hillary Clinton emails inquiry and opened the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.
Text messages between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in which they displayed a negative opinion of Trump, were uncovered during the Justice Department’s inspector general investigation into the DOJ and FBI’s conduct during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server.
Their text messages are still under intense scrutiny by GOP investigators concerned about potential bias within the Justice Department and FBI. Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said on Sunday that their discussions sound “an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason.”
The U.S. Constitution defines treason as assisting U.S. enemies or “levying war” against the U.S.
The DOJ inspector general report, which came out in the summer of 2018, said their text messages “potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. But the inspector general determined that there was no evidence “improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions.”
