Former FBI agent Strzok: Attacks from Trump ‘outrageous’ and ‘cruel’
WASHINGTON >> Peter Strzok spent his FBI career hunting Russian and Chinese spies, but after news broke of derogatory text messages he had sent about President Donald Trump, he came to feel like he was the one being hunted.
There were menacing phone calls and messages from strangers, and anxious peeks out window shades before his family would leave the house. FBI security experts advised him of best practices — walk around your car before entering, watch for unfamiliar vehicles in your neighborhood — more commonly associated with mob targets looking to elude detection.
“Being subjected to outrageous attacks up to and including by the president himself, which are full of lies and mischaracterizations and just crude and cruel, is horrible,” Strzok told The Associated Press in an interview. “There’s no way around it.”
A new book by Strzok traces his arc from veteran counterintelligence agent to the man who came to embody Trump’s public scorn of FBI and his characterization of its Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.” The texts cost Strzok his job and drew vitriol from Trump. But even among
Trump critics, Strzok isn’t a hero. His anti-trump texts on a government phone to an FBI lawyer gave Trump and his supporters a major opening to undercut the bureau’s credibility right as it was conducting one of the most consequential investigations in its history.
Trump’s attacks have continued even as two inspector general reports found no evidence Strzok’s work in the investigations were tainted by political bias and multiple probes have affirmed the Russia probe’s validity.
Strzok expresses measured regret for the texts in “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump,” due out Tuesday.
“I deeply regret casually commenting about the things I observed in the headlines and behind the scenes, and I regret how effectively my words were weaponized to harm the Bureau and buttress absurd conspiracy theories about our vital work,” Strzok writes.
Before becoming a virtual household name, Strzok spent two decades at the FBI toiling in relative anonymity on sensational spy cases. He helped uncover Russian sleeper agents inside the U.S., worked the Edward Snowden case and led the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information. (She did, he writes, but not in a way meriting prosecution).
After the Clinton case concluded in July 2016, Strzok opened an investigation into whether the campaign of her Republican opponent was coordinating with Russia, conceiving the “Crossfire Hurricane” codename he says proved prescient.
Strzok said he intended for his book to lend insight into the Clinton probe, Russian election interference and, “first and foremost, the counterintelligence threat that I see in Donald Trump.”
“To do that,” he said in the interview, “I wanted to show the reader what happened but also why they should believe me.”
As the investigation progressed, Strzok came to regard the Trump administration’s actions regarding Russia as “highly suspicious” and the president as compromised by Russia, including because of what Strzok says were Trump’s repeated efforts to mislead the public about dealings with Moscow.
Those concerns deepened after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director and bragged to a Russian diplomat that “great pressure” was removed. That interaction was like a “five-alarm fire,” Strzok says, and the FBI began investigating whether Trump himself was under Russia’s sway.
STORRS, CONN. >> With the coronavirus spreading through colleges at alarming rates, universities are scrambling to find quarantine locations in dormitory buildings and off-campus properties to isolate the thousands of students who have caught COVID-19 or been exposed to it.
Sacred Heart University has converted a 34-room guesthouse at the former Connecticut headquarters of General Electric to quarantine students. The University of South Carolina ran out of space at a dormitory for quarantined students and began sending them to rooms it rented in hotel-like quarters at a training center for prosecutors. The Air Force Academy sent 400 cadets to hotels to free up space on its Colorado base for quarantines.
The actions again demonstrate how the virus has uprooted traditional campus life amid a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. and proven to be especially problematic for universities since the start of the school year. Many colleges quickly scrapped in-person learning in favor of online after cases began to spike, bars have been shut down in college towns, and students, fraternities and sororities have been repeatedly disciplined for parties and large gatherings.
Health officials such as White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx have been urging colleges to keep students on campus to avoid them infecting members of their family and community.
At Sacred Heart, which acquired the 66-acre GE campus in 2016, the guesthouse that once provided rooms for visiting corporate executives will be used for the rest of the year to isolate any of its 3,000 students who test positive for COVID-19 and are unable to return home, said Gary Macnamara, the school’s director of public safety.
Rooms are stocked with snacks and equipped with TVS and work stations for remote learning. Health officials will do periodic checkups, security is stationed outside and card swipes keep track of who enters or leaves.
“With all the stress and fear a student may have if in isolation we believe we need to make it as comfortable as possible,” Macnamara said. “This guesthouse helps us accomplish that.”
But not every situation is as comfortable.
Ryan Bologna has been locked in his dorm room at the University of Connecticut since 12 cases were found in his building recently. He’s allowed to go to a dining hall next door but has had no other contact with the outside world.
Zoom classes and virtual marching band practice and video gaming are not what the communications major had envisioned for the start of his senior year.
“I do have friends I’ve made throughout the years that I can talk to,” he said. “But If I were a freshman, I’d be really struggling right now as far as the social aspect.”
Isolating students seems to be working in states like Connecticut, where the infection rate at Uconn on Thursday was 1.34% among residential students tested for the virus.
But the results haven’t been as good elsewhere.
The University of Alabama recently informed students in half of a fivestory complex that they had to move to other housing to make room for infected or potentially infected students, because two other quarantine-andisolation facilities would reach capacity.
So far, more than 1,000 students on the Tuscaloosa campus have tested positive since mid-august. As of Thursday, the system’s online dashboard showed its quarantine housing was 36% full.
The university banned on-campus events for two weeks and the city of Tuscaloosa ordered bars closed amid concern about virus spread. The footballobsessed school is still planning to allow fans for games — with a ban on tailgating — when the Crimson Tide begin their season this month.
Freshman Zachary Bourg, 18, spent 10 days in a quarantine dorm after testing positive Aug. 23. He’s now back in his regular room.
“I want to stay here for the fall semester,” he said. “But if cases continue to rise at the rate they are then the likelihood of that occurring is starting to get lower.”
The University of South Carolina has about 35,000 students on its main Columbia campus. More than 1,000 have tested positive for COVID-19 so far, with many more ordered into quarantine after exposure to Covid-positive students.
They were first housed in a dormitory called Bates West, where some students are allowed to room together. But once that filled the university began sending students to off-campus at a training center for prosecutors.
“We do feel like we can surge additional space, either on campus or nearby, to support the students,” said Larry Thomas, a school spokesman.
Brown University has delayed the start in-person learning until next month at the earliest because of concerns over where to put those who might test positive. Schools such as Georgia College & State University, a 7,000-student school in Milledgeville which has reported more than 600 cases since the beginning of August, are telling students that if they have COVID-19, they should leave campus.
There’s a debate in the health community about whether to send students home or keep them in quarantine.
Dr. Joseph Gerald, associate professor of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona, said the idea of identifying cases, contact tracing and quarantining is the right approach. He said it’s just going to be hard to do in dorms, frat houses or places where students congregate.
“One of the things we’re struggling with here at the University of Arizona is what to do with multistory buildings, where kids need to get to their rooms, but we have one or two elevators,” he said. “It’s not really possible to make an elevator safe.”
Dr. Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine infectious disease expert, dean of the National School for Tropical Medicine and codirector Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development said many colleges simply cannot open safely.
“There’s only so much you can do with Plexiglas and social distancing and testing,” he said. “That will help get you about 20% to 30% of the way, the other 70% is whether you have an adequate suppression of transmission. You might get away with it at Bowdoin College … but clearly it’s going to fail at the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia and places like that.”