STRZOK: Agreed…76
In August of that year, the tone was very different when the two texted about Donald Trump:
PAGE: He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!
STRZOK: No. No, he won’t. We’ll stop it.77
Another text exchanged between the paramours suggested the problem of politicized law enforcement did not just involve FBI officials. In September 2016, Page texted Strzok that “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.”78 It’s not clear to which case or cases she was referring, but POTUS is the federal acronym for the president of the United States. Barack Obama owes the country an explanation. So does then–FBI director James Comey.
And, of course, so do Strzok and Page, who have been allowed to evade responsibility with the help of a friendly media. So opposed is the press corps to Donald Trump that many media folk now reflexively reject his arguments regardless of the merits. Consider the following “fact check” feature published by the Associated Press in May of 2020:
TRUMP, on the 2016 election: “I’m fighting the deep state. I’m fighting the swamp.… They never thought I was going to win, and then I won. And then they tried to get me out. That was the ‘insurance policy.’ She’s going to win, but just in case she doesn’t win we have an insurance policy.”—interview aired Sunday on “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
THE FACTS: He’s repeating a false claim that there was a conspiracy afoot to take him out if he won the 2016 presidential race, based on a text message between two FBI employees.
Trump has repeatedly depicted the two as referring to a plot—or insurance policy—to oust him from office if he beat Democrat Hillary Clinton. It’s apparent from the text that it wasn’t that.
Agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, both now gone from the bureau, said the text messages reflected a debate about how aggressively the FBI should investigate Trump and his campaign when expectations at the time were that he would lose anyway.
Strzok texted about something Page had said to the FBI’s deputy director, to the effect that “there’s no way he gets elected.” But Strzok argued that the FBI should not assume Clinton would win: “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.” He likened the situation to “an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” He has said he was not discussing a post-election plot to drive Trump from office.79
But if Strzok was not willing to accept the risk of the outcome of a free election, and instead favored “an insurance policy” in a discussion among FBI officials investigating Trump and his associates, doesn’t that sound exactly the way Trump described it?
Strzok was fired first by special counsel Robert Mueller and later by the FBI for his texts displaying animus against Trump. Given Strzok’s extreme bias, some could argue that it taints all his work on the Russia investigation. Certainly it calls into question the motivations behind this unprecedented intervention in U.S. politics by a law enforcement agency using the surveillance tools designed for use against foreign enemies.
This brings us back to the official start of the collusion investigation in July of 2016. The many abuses that followed are now a matter of public record. But at its beginning, was the investigation justified? Was it appropriately predicated?
Let’s now consider the formal moment of creation of the Crossfire Hurricane case on July 31, 2016. A copy of the FBI electronic communication that started it all was obtained in the spring of 2020 via a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch.80
Kevin Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote upon the document’s release:
First, the document is oddly constructed. In a normal, legitimate FBI Electronic Communication, or EC, there would be a “To” and a “From” line. The Crossfire Hurricane EC has only a “From” line; it is from a part of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division whose contact is listed as Peter Strzok. The EC was drafted also by Peter Strzok. And, finally, it was approved by Peter Strzok. Essentially, it is a document created by Peter Strzok, approved by Peter Strzok, and sent from Peter Strzok to Peter Strzok.
On that basis alone, the document is an absurdity, violative of all FBI protocols and, therefore, invalid on its face. An agent cannot approve his or her own case; that would make a mockery of the oversight designed to protect Americans.81
Peter Strzok of all people seems to agree. “I can assure you…,” said Strzok at a House judiciary committee hearing in 2018, “at no time in any of those texts, did those personal beliefs ever enter into the realm of any action I took.” Then he said:
“Furthermore, this isn’t just me sitting here telling you. You don’t have to take my word for it. At every step, every investigative decision, there are multiple layers of people above me—the assistant director, executive assistant director, deputy director, and director of the FBI—and multiple layers of people below me—section chiefs, supervisors, unit chiefs, case agents and analysts—all of whom were involved in all of these decisions. They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them. That is who we are as the FBI.”82
What happened to all those layers when Strzok created the Trump investigation? Perhaps if Strzok had included agents on the ground in the discussion, they might have told him he had no case. Brock notes other significant problems with Strzok’s infamous document:
The Crossfire Hurricane case was opened as a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) investigation. A FARA investigation involves a criminal violation of law—in this case, a negligent or intentional failure to register with the U.S. government after being engaged by a foreign country to perform services on its behalf—that is punishable by fines
