Ex-FBI agent says Trump is security threat
WASHINGTON — A former senior FBI agent at the center of the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia defends the handling of the inquiries and declares President Donald Trump a national security threat in a new memoir, while admitting that the bureau made mistakes that upended the 2016 presidential election.
The former agent, Peter Strzok, who was removed from the special counsel’s team and later fired over disparaging texts he sent about Trump, has mostly kept silent as the president and his supporters have vilified him.
But Strzok’s new book, “Compromised,” a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times before its publication Tuesday, provides a detailed account of navigating the two politically toxic investigations. Strzok also reveals details about the FBI’s internal debate over investigating the president himself, writing that the question arose early in the Trump presidency and suggesting that agents were eyeing others around Trump. Strzokat first opposed investigating the president.
But in a scathing appraisal, Strzok concludes that Trump is hopelessly corrupt and a national security threat. The investigations that Strzok oversaw showed the president’s “willingness to accept political assistance from an opponent like Russia — and, it follows, his willingness to subvert everything America stands for.”
“That’s not patriotic,” Strzok writes. “It’s the opposite.”
Trump and his supporters seized on Strzok’s texts when they were first disclosed in late 2017 as evidence of a plot to destroy his campaign and presidency.
“The reporting about my texts hadn’t only whipped Trump into a frenzy,” Strzok writes. “It had also sent Republicans in Congress into a righteous peeve, giving them fodder for right-wing indignation that would eventually ferment into the deep-state fairy tale that would consume conservative media.”
In his book, Strzok lays out the reasoning for opening the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into whether any Trump campaign associates had conspired with Russia’s interference operations in the 2016 election.
When FBI officials later considered opening a counterintelligence investigation on the president, they faced a sobering reality. “We needed to ask a question that had never before arisen in the entire 240-year history of our republic: whether the president of the
United States himself might be acting as an agent of a foreign adversary,” Strzok writes.
Eventually, the FBI did begin investigating the president after he fired James Comey as its director in May 2017, a step that also prompted the appointment of a special counsel.
Strzok also devotes considerable time in the book to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, known inside the bureau as Midyear Exam. He concedes that Comey erred by holding a news conference in July 2016 to say that the FBI would not recommend Clinton be charged with mishandling classified information but that her conduct was “extremely careless.”