Few inside the FBI have disgraced both the agency and himself quite as thoroughly as special agent Peter Strzok. He was fired from his position as the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division after text message exchanges with his paramour and colleague, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, were revealed.
Strzok led both the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation and the early stages of the FBI’s bogus investigation into then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election. Strzok’s fanatical quest to derail first Trump’s candidacy and then his presidency did more to damage the public’s trust in the FBI than anything in recent memory.
Last week, a draft copy of an August 2018 letter written by then-Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich informing Strzok of his firing was published inside a court filing related to his 2019 wrongful termination lawsuit against the Department of Justice.
In the letter, Bowdich accused Strzok of “repeated, sustained errors of judgment.” He claimed that a review of numerous text messages between Strzok and Page made it “difficult to imagine another incident … which brought so much discredit to the organization.”
Bowdich wrote. “In my 23 years in the FBI, I have not seen a more impactful series of missteps which called into question the entire organization and more thoroughly damaged the reputation of the entire organization. In our role as FBI employees we must sometimes make unpopular decisions, but the public should be able to examine our work and not have to question our motives.
He continued, “In your adjudication, I removed all the politics, pundits, commentary, and the media from reporting the decision point I must address. When I strip away all the ‘noise,’ I am left with the facts and the extremely damaging impact to our organization, which will take years to overcome.
Bowdich noted, “Though the Office of the Inspector General found no evidence of bias impact[ing]” FBI investigations, Strzok’s “sustained pattern of bad judgment in the use of an FBI device has called into question for many the decisions made during both the Clinton e-mail investigation and the initial states of the Russian Collusion investigation.”
A detailed list of the test messages exchanged between Strzok and Page in 2016 can be viewed in this document.
It is disturbing that the OIG found no evidence that Strzok’s bias affected his investigations. Recall the long-awaited report from “straight-shooter” Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Department of Justice.
The comprehensive and consequential report, titled the “Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” released in December 2019, did much to silence Republican claims of malfeasance within the FBI.
Horowitz included a lengthy list of serious mistakes and omissions made by the FBI in their applications for a FISA warrant (and three renewals) to surveil Carter Page, a former low-level adviser to the Trump campaign. Yet he inexplicably concluded that none of them rose to the level of criminality. This allowed Democrats to boast that Trump’s claims of a political conspiracy against him by top-ranking Obama administrations officials was nonsense.
According to a summary of the inspector general’s findings published by The New York Times, the report stated: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” by the FBI.
The report claimed, “Witnesses told us that they did not recall observing during these discussions any instances or indications of improper motivations or political bias on the part of the participants.”
Information and documents that have been publicly released since that time puts those conclusions to the lie. Especially damning was the subsequent admission from FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith that he’d altered a key email the bureau had included in one of the renewal applications to the FISA Court for the warrant to spy on Page.
At any rate, despite Democrats’ claims to the media that Horowitz’ report “exonerated” the FBI, Bowdich’s scathing termination letter shows that agency insiders understood the extent of their wrongdoing.
Strzok, for his part, continues to appear on CNN and MSNBC as a so-called “expert witness” on all matters related to the FBI which can only be described as a travesty.
A previous version of this article appeared in The Western Journal.
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“…Strzok, for his part, continues to appear on CNN and MSNBC as a so-called “expert witness” on all matters related to the FBI which can only be described as a travesty…”
Strzok brings the same level of discredit to the organizations he works for now that he did to the one that promoted him for decades to one its its highest positions.
According to Jim Jordan, there are 14 whistleblowers, so from that I conclude that there are only, at this point, 14 FBI employees who have any reputation to protect. Out of the thousands who are spineless cowards, with guns, that bodes pretty poorly on the agency as a whole.
Look at how the plant blossomed with the FBI, post Strzok, where families caring about their children, become labeled as terrorists, and anything conservative, or even a mediocre level of conservative views in their heads, are also labeled as terrorists. It used to be that the FBI chased down dangerous criminals, took care of the kidnapping of children and investigated and arrested bank robbers.
What a change!
If this is the course of the good ship lollipop, I can’t wait to see the IRS on steroids, can you?
Either Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich is so blinkered by his OWN biases and antipathy for Trump, the GOP and the choice of voters to change direction of the way the government was being run when they elected Donald J. Trump or he lacks, utterly, the courage to stand up to ‘The Deep State’. Bowdich’s noting of “…the Office of the Inspector General found no evidence of bias impact[ing]” FBI investigations…” is even more disturbing. That both he and IG can look at a set of facts that so clearly and abundantly demonstrate not only an improper bias in the execution of his duties and those of many others within the DOJ and fail to SEE both the bias and its impact is beyond stunning; it is clear evidence that the entire DOJ and, in all probability, everything associated therewith is beyond salvation and should be disbanded and redesigned from top to bottom OR discarded as a failed experiment.
Just as the Department of Education does nothing to advance Education; just as the Department of Energy does NOTHING to address energy related issues in a positive and meaningful way, the Department of Justice does NOTHING to advance the cause of Justice in this country and, arguably, does much to do the exact opposite.