Compromised by Peter Strzok

Author:Peter Strzok
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780358237532
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

“Some pretty big surprises”

When I sat down to scroll through the news at home that night, I shook my head. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was now a Trump adviser and supporter, had told a Fox News reporter that Trump had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days . . . I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises . . . You’ll see.” Though he was vague, I suspected that he was hinting about the laptop. Giuliani had previously boasted about his FBI sources, although he later denied contact with any active FBI agents. His statement on the heels of our decision to seek a warrant wasn’t reassuring.

Giuliani’s statement hinted at an undercurrent of politics at the Bureau. The idea advanced by some congressmen that the FBI is some sort of liberal hotbed is laughable to me. The FBI’s workforce is largely conservative, and has an institutional mistrust of the Clintons that began in earnest during director Louis Freeh’s tenure. I would occasionally catch an earful from agents who knew I was leading Midyear. At lunch with a retired executive one day, I heard, Pete, you’ve got to get that bitch. Stepping toward an open elevator one afternoon, I crossed paths with an agent whom I had worked with long before, when I had first transferred to headquarters from Boston, who said, We’re all counting on you. My response was always the same: We’re going to follow the facts. If there’s something there, we’ll find it.

To be clear, I never felt that anyone was pressuring me to do anything improper. I can’t emphasize this FBI cultural norm enough: they wouldn’t have done that, and if they had, I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I saw this behavior as people with strong personal opinions voicing them. They had their opinions, I had mine (which, unlike them, I kept to myself while talking with superiors and subordinates in my chain of command). We all did our jobs.

This is why Giuliani’s alleged FBI sources make me so angry. If people on the inside were talking, that was wrong. They shouldn’t have been disclosing investigative information, and they sure shouldn’t have been sharing it with a political operative knowing full well it would be used politically to help a candidate.

Similarly, many months later it infuriated me to hear congressman Devin Nunes tell Fox News that “we had whistleblowers that came to us in late September 2016 who talked to us about this laptop sitting up in New York that had additional email on it. The House Intelligence Committee, we had that, but we couldn’t do anything with it.” The first I heard of Nunes’s claim was when he made it, which was in June 2018, and in fairness, I have no idea if that statement is correct. Sometimes members of Congress appeared to have a casual relationship with the truth. But if it was true and someone in the FBI did inform Nunes

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