FBI agent who sent texts says he’ll testify before Congress
The FBI agent who was removed from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election for sending anti-Trump texts intends to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and any other congressional committee that asks, his attorney said in a letter made public Sunday.
Peter Strzok, who was singled out in a recent Justice Department inspector general report for the politically charged messages, would be willing to testify without immunity, and he would not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to any question, his attorney, Aitan Goelman, said in an interview Sunday. Strzok has become a special target of President Donald Trump, who has used the texts to question the Russia investigation.
Goelman said Strzok “wants the chance to clear his name and tell his story.”
“He thinks that his position, character and actions have all been misrepresented and caricatured, and he wants an opportunity to remedy that,” he said.
If Strzok were to testify publicly, the hearing could be explosive, perhaps ex- posing new details about investigators’ thinking on some of the FBI’s most high-profile probes.
Strzok had a leadership role on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, as well the probe into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 election. That investigation is now being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who once considered Strzok a key member of his team but removed him once informed of the anti-Trump messages.
Goelman said he had not discussed any dates with lawmakers on when Strzok might appear at a hearing. Politico reported that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., had started the process to subpoena Strzok, though Goelman said that the lawmaker had done so without having asked whether Strzok might appear voluntarily.
Goelman wrote in a letter to Goodlatte that a subpoena would be “wholly unnecessary.”
The inspector general alleged in a report released last week that Strzok had implied “willingness to take official action” to prevent Trump from becom- ing president, pointing to a message in which the agent told an FBI lawyer in August 2016 that “we’ll stop” Trump from making it to the White House.
“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” the lawyer, Lisa Page, wrote to Strzok.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also suggested that Strzok’s bias might have played a role in the FBI’s not acting expeditiously in the fall of 2016 to follow up on a new lead related to the Clinton email case. In late September, agents in the FBI’s New York Field Office had discovered emails potentially relevant to the case on a laptop of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, but the agents investigating Clinton did not seek a search warrant to access the messages until late the next month.
Goelman said there was “no question” that Strzok regrets sending anti-Trump messages but added: “I think what he was doing is expressing his political opinions i n what he thought was a private text conversation, and he regrets that this has been weaponized by people with political motivations to try to discredit the Mueller investigation.”