"This simple fact could explain something that made no sense otherwise: why Trump repeatedly. He was compromised, Strzok writes, because of his questionable business dealings, the hush money paid on his behalf to silence women, shady transactions at his charity and, most importantly, "his lies about his Russia dealings," including his secret 2015 effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow even as he told the world that he had no business with Russia. "In my view, they were most likely a collection of grifters pursuing individual personal interests: their own money- and power-driven agendas."īut he also believed, he wrote, that even if Trump didn't formally conspire with the Russian election interference operation, the president was badly compromised. "I was skeptical that all the different threads amounted to anything more than bumbling incompetence, a confederacy of dunces who were too dumb to collude," Strzok writes, summing up his view of the case for a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia before he was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation in July 2017 over his biased texts. IMAGE: Elijah Cummings (Joshua Roberts / Reuters file) To the contrary, as he tells it, career public servants inside the FBI and the Justice Department were gobsmacked in 2016 by what they uncovered about a presidential campaign that seemed to find unlimited time to meet with Russians, practically inviting exploitation by a foreign adversary. But his insider account provides a detailed refutation of the notion that a group of anti-Trump denizens of the deep state cooked up the Russia "hoax," as Trump likes to call it, to take down a president they didn't support. Trump."ĭespite the cinematic title, Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia. Now Peter Strzok, a decorated counterintelligence agent who was fired by the bureau he loved, is telling his story in a new book, "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. WASHINGTON - He was the FBI agent so central to the Trump-Russia investigation that he came up with the code name: Crossfire Hurricane, from the lyrics of a Rolling Stones song that happened to be in his head.Īnd he was the same FBI agent whose anti-Trump texts on a government phone - exchanged in "intimate" conversations with an FBI lawyer who wasn't his wife - gave President Donald Trump and his allies powerful ammunition they used in their efforts to discredit the investigation.
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