investigation says Trump was 'compromised'
Peter Strzok, a decorated counterintelligence agent who was fired by the bureau he loved when his texts emerged, is telling his story in a new book.
By Ken Dilanian
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.
And 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.
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. Trump."
Despite the cinematic title, Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia. 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.
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.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. "In my view, they were most likely a collection of grifters pursuing individual personal interests: their own money- and power-driven agendas."
But he also believed, he wrote, that even if Trump didn't formally conspire with the Russian election interference operation, the president was badly compromised. 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."Putin knew he had lied. And Trump knew that Putin knew — a shared understanding that provided the framework for a potentially coercive relationship between the president of the United States and the leader of one of our greatest adversaries," writes Strzok, who was deputy assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
"This simple fact could explain something that made no sense otherwise: why Trump repeatedly ... (chose) the course of action that made little sense in the context of U.S. national security but that clearly benefitted Russia," he writes.
In a statement to NBC News, White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern called Strzok's account "utter nonsense" and argued that neither Mueller nor Congress "have found any wrongdoing by the President." He added: "Strzok is a joke, and his book isn't worth the paper it's printed on. "
Counterintelligence agents are tasked with rooting out foreign influence, and any such agent worth his or her salt would have been incompetent not to investigate whether Russia had leverage over a new president, Strzok writes. That's why Strzok and his FBI colleagues took the historic step of opening a counterintelligence investigation into Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 — an investigation Strzok says he earlier had opposed.
Comey's firing also led to the appointment of Mueller, a former director of the FBI, as special counsel. Strzok, who had also played a key role in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails, joined his team."If there was one person in the country who could determine whether I was right to be concerned, it was Robert S. Mueller III," he writes.
But Mueller never did answer the question of whether Trump was "compromised" by Russia — he never even tried to, according to the massive report he issued describing his findings.
Mueller conducted what was purely a criminal investigation designed to determine whether crimes were committed as part of Russia's election interference operation and to prosecute any other crimes he uncovered. Prosecute he did: 37 indictments or guilty pleas resulted from his investigation.
Of the four original subjects of Crossfire Hurricane — former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign aide George Papadopoulos and former campaign adviser Carter Page — two, Manafort and Papadopoulos, went to prison, and a third, Flynn, pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing amid a legal dispute over whether his case should be dismissed.
But none of them — and no other American — was accused of conspiring with Russia. In his report, Mueller said he couldn't find enough evidence to bring criminal charges alleging such a conspiracy, even as he punted on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice.
Whether crimes were committed is a different question from whether Russia had a hold over the president, however. Who was supposed to answer that counterintelligence question? Who would look at whether Trump had, in fact, benefited from massive investments by Russians, as his son once said he did? Or whether there was any reason to think Putin could blackmail him?
Strzok, 50, an Army veteran who worked most of his two-decade FBI career chasing Russian spies, says it was the job of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. But Strzok writes that at the time he left the investigation in 2017, "we were still looking for the right way to investigate those counterintelligence concerns."
A recent assessment by the House Intelligence Committee, which has sought classified briefings on the matter, says the FBI " has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump's foreign financial ties."
Strzok said in an interview published Friday in The Atlantic that he believed the FBI's counterintelligence inquiries into Trump "largely died on the vine," which two people familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.
It's doubtful, current and former U.S. officials say, that anyone at the FBI ever saw Trump's tax returns or looked into whether he borrowed money from Russian oligarchs — something many Americans assumed was happening during the Mueller probe. |
