OPINION:
Former FBI texter Peter Strzok hit the million-dollar jackpot, gifted by the Biden Justice Department, which deemed it wrong for the Trump administration to have released the FBI agent’s personal messages calling his target, Donald Trump, an “idiot.”
Also in those texts with lover and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Mr. Strzok pledged to “stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president. He made that promise in August 2016, a week after Mr. Strzok wrote the justification for opening Crossfire Hurricane, which he led.
It was a full-blown counterintelligence investigation into Trump world without the FBI first interviewing any principals or checking intelligence agencies. None of it turned out to have any evidence of collusion with Russia.
Mr. Strzok’s continuing 2019 lawsuit against the Trump team for publicizing the texts, in which Ms. Page called the Republican presidential candidate a “loathsome human,” has taken some interesting twists.
At the time, Ms. Page was an assistant to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who joined the FBI headquarters in going gaga over the Christopher Steele dossier, which was funded and spread by Hillary Clinton operatives. None of the dossier’s felony-level claims against Mr. Trump and his aides proved true, but the 35 pages of gossip sent the FBI, press and Democrats on a wild drive-by, sabotaging the new president.
In 2024, Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, the same guy who tried to put Mr. Trump in prison, oversaw a settlement that netted Mr. Strzok $1.2 million and Ms. Page $800,000.
Conservatives say the Privacy Act should not protect texts by two senior FBI officials expressing their partisan bias on FBI-issued devices against a presidential candidate they hoped to investigate.
When confronted at a hearing by Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, Mr. Garland said, “We reached settlements based on our litigators’ assessment of whether we can win the case and how much it will cost if we lose the case.”
I asked Tom Fitton, president of government watchdog Judicial Watch, about the $2 million jackpot.
“One can fairly conclude it looks like the Biden administration was paying off and helping anti-‘Trumpers,’” he said. “These were text messages documenting government misconduct. The privacy interest is pretty darn weak. This is a political move. We’ve been doing this work 30-plus years at Judicial Watch. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Mr. Garland mentioned his “litigators.” The lead attorney was Brian Netter, an assistant deputy attorney general.
James Fitzpatrick, who heads the Center to Advance Security in America, told The Federalist news site that he filed an open records request with the Justice Department. He said he was told that Mr. Netter, now an anti-Trump legal activist, ultimately approved the million-dollar settlement.
In 2022, Mr. Netter defended the Trump administration’s decision to fire Mr. Strzok. A Justice Department colleague publicly filed the damning 2018 dismissal letter from Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich.
“It is difficult to fathom the repeated, sustained errors of judgment you made while serving as the lead agent in two of the most high-profile investigations in the country,” Mr. Bowdich told Mr. Strzok regarding Russia and a probe into Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
“Your 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 email investigations and the initial states of the Russian Collusion investigation. In short, your repeated selfishness has called into question the credibility of the entire FBI. … 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 organization.”
Mr. Strzok continues to pursue his lawsuit’s other claim: that he is owed back pay for being wrongly fired.
On this front, Mr. Garland sides with the Trump team. In a September 2024 filing asking the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, Justice Department attorneys wrote: “The FBI dismissed Mr. Strzok because he exchanged politically charged text messages on his FBI issued device about individuals who were centrally connected to high-profile investigations Mr. Strzok was leading. … Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page exchanged more than 40,000 unique text messages on their FBI-issued devices [from 2015 to 2017].”
Mr. Netter is now legal director at Democracy Forward, joining forces with Marc Elias, an early Steele dossier facilitator as the Clinton campaign’s attorney at the firm Perkins Coie.
Democracy Forward’s self-congratulatory motto: “We met the first 100 days of the Trump-Vance administration with 100 days of courage.”
In 2016, Mr. Elias hired Fusion GPS, which in turn recruited Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who specialized in Russia. Mr. Steele met with Mr. Elias during the campaign as the dossier writer toured Washington, spoon-feeding reporters eager to damage candidate Trump.
Mr. Elias stayed a loyal dossier reader.
Roughly a year later, he gave closed-door testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, whose chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, was investigating the FBI’s obsession with and misuse of dossiers.
Under Mr. Strzok, Crossfire Hurricane was wrapping up that December 2017 reliance on the inaccurate dossier to justify to judges a year’s worth of wiretaps against Trump volunteer Carter Page.
“I thought that the information that he or they wished to convey was accurate and important,” Mr. Elias testified. “Some of the information that was in it I think has actually proved true. So, you know, my opinion that it was accurate and important, I think was right.”
No, it wasn’t. Turns out he helped facilitate the biggest political hoax in American history. None of the bizarre claims, such as Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveling to Prague to meet Vladimir Putin’s hoods, was true.
Igor Danchenko, the dossier’s main source, told the FBI in January and March 2017 that the stuff he fed Mr. Steele was unconfirmed gossip the Briton had exaggerated.
FBI Director Kash Patel, who ferreted out the FBI scandal as Mr. Nunes’ right-hand man, is now reviewing the entire Crossfire Hurricane saga.
At Mr. Patel’s confirmation hearing in January, Sen. Lindsey Graham asked, “Do you believe that Crossfire Hurricane was one of the most disgusting episodes in FBI history of a corrupt investigation led by corrupt people who wanted to take Donald Trump down?”
Mr. Patel: “Yes, sir.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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