Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The FBI has finally fired Peter Strzok, the former senior counterintelligence official whose anti-Trump texts have compromised the bureau’s investigations of Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized State Department email server and Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Media responded Monday by questioning whether the White House influenced the decision.
How about another question: What does a fed have to do to get fired in this city?
Strzok, who oversaw both the Clinton and Russia investigations, was a toxic employee; his stupidity matched only by his hubris. The bureau should’ve fired him long before the president weighed in on the issue.
[Related: Peter Strzok is fired, and this former FBI agent is shedding no tears for him]
The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended demoting Strzok for unprofessional behavior. The office also recommended a 60-day suspension.
But FBI deputy director David Bowdich overruled this recommendation. He opted instead to give Strzok the heave-ho.
“The decision to terminate was taken in response to political pressure,” Strzok’s attorney, Aitan Goelman, complained Monday. “This decision should be deeply troubling to all Americans. A lengthy investigation and multiple rounds of congressional testimony failed to produce a shred of evidence that Special Agent Strzok’s personal views ever affected his work.”
To be honest, I’m as interested in knowing whether the White House influenced Bowdich as I am knowing why it took the FBI this long to toss Strzok on his ear.
We know about his anti-Trump texts because he relied on his work phone to communicate with his mistress, former FBI attorney Lisa Page. They used company phones for pillow talk because they were trying to hide the affair from their spouses, Page told investigators.
In the words of the anti-Trump resistance: Let that sink in.
A senior FBI counterintelligence official compromised himself by engaging in a long-term extramarital affair (hello, blackmail!). Moreover, the woman with whom Strzok was having an affair was herself a married FBI official.
They then used work phones to disparage the people Strzok was investigating, leaving a paper trail a mile long for their supervisors to find.
It’s like a matryoshka doll of sleazy incompetence.
That Strzok opened himself up to a honeypot scheme shows he’s unfit to serve an agency that prides itself on fidelity and integrity. That he didn’t have even the good sense to text his mistress from a burner phone is icing on a very stupid cake.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the inspector general who found the anti-Trump texts reported they were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, [imply] a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.”
Then there’s that thing where Strzok emailed a “highly sensitive search warrant to his personal email account.”
The only good reason for the FBI not to fire Strzok would be to deny him martyr status, which he’ll no doubt claim now. The bureau chose to be done with him, which this is better for them in long-run. Strzok showed himself to be an untrustworthy and unprofessional embarrassment. The FBI is better for having rid itself of him.
