It has been revealed that the lead FBI agent supervising the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the alleged Trump-Russia connection has been removed from the Mueller team for sending anti-Trump messages:
A top FBI agent at the center of both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team for exchanging derogatory text messages about the president with a colleague.
Peter Strzok, a veteran FBI investigator, was shuffled off to the FBI’s human resources department by Mueller after the Justice Department’s inspector general opened an investigation into the texts, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
And according to The Washington Post, Strzok exchanged the messages with Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who was also assigned to and later removed from Mueller’s team. Strzok and Page, who works for FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, were reportedly having an extramarital affair.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, said that Strzok was removed from the Russia investigation as soon as the inspector general’s findings were revealed this summer.
What makes this a farce is the FBI stonewalling for the last three months:
The Post reported that Strzok and Page exchanged text messages that “expressed anti-Trump sentiments and other comments that appeared to favor Clinton.”
Word of the messages and the affair were news to Nunes, even though the committee had issued a subpoena that covered information about Strzok’s demotion more than three months ago. The committee’s broadly worded subpoena for information related to the so-called Trump dossier went to the FBI and DOJ on Aug. 24. In follow-up conversations on the scope of the subpoena, committee staff told the FBI and DOJ that it included information on the circumstances of Strzok’s reassignment.
On Oct. 11, Nunes met with deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. In that meeting, Nunes specifically discussed the committee’s request for information about Strzok.
In an Oct. 31 committee staff meeting with the FBI, bureau officials refused a request for information about Strzok.
On Nov. 20, the committee again requested an interview with Strzok. (Three days earlier, on November 17, Strzok met with the Senate Intelligence Committee.)
On Nov. 29, Nunes again spoke to Rosenstein, and again discussed Strzok.
On Dec. 1, the committee again requested to speak with Strzok.
After each occasion, the FBI and DOJ did nothing. Now, in what appears to be an orchestrated leak, both the Post and Times published the reason for Strzok’s demotion, along with concerns that the revelation might help President Trump. “Among federal law enforcement officials, there is great concern that exposure of the texts they exchanged may be used by the president and his defenders to attack the credibility of the Mueller probe and the FBI more broadly,” the Post reported. The Times reported that “the existence of the text messages is likely to fuel claims by Mr. Trump that he is the target of a witch hunt.”
The House Intelligence Committee is gearing up to find the FBI in contempt of Congress:
Nunes and the committee had known about Strzok’s removal for months, but not the reasons for it, which were only revealed on Saturday in what York suggested was an “orchestrated leak” to the Times and the Post. In a furious statement on Saturday, Nunes accused the FBI of deliberately covering up political bias on the Mueller team.
“By hiding from Congress, and from the American people, documented political bias by a key FBI head investigator for both the Russia collusion probe and the Clinton email investigation, the FBI and DOJ engaged in a willful attempt to thwart Congress’ constitutional oversight responsibility,” Nunes said, as quoted by York.
Nunes has reportedly promised to take action on the citation for contempt if the FBI does not come clean by the end of December. He will likely have the backing of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has also complained about the FBI’s apparent refusal to turn over information to the committee, especially on the degree to which it relied on the discredited “Russia dossier” that was paid for by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
Earlier this year, Nunes stepped back from direct involvement in the committee’s Russia investigation after questions about his role in exposing the “unmasking” of U.S. citizens in intelligence reports during the last days of the Obama administration. Democrats have stalled an ethics investigation into Nunes to keep him from resuming his role in a full capacity. However, Nunes has not given up his chairmanship and still wields the subpoena power.
This stonewalling is just one sign of the cancer that permeates the FBI and Mueller’s team and it may have a great deal to do with the controversial Trump “dossier.” Strzok was a key figure in that dossier.
House investigators told Fox News they have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” and launched a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election that ultimately came to encompass FISA surveillance of a Trump campaign associate.
The “dossier” was a compendium of salacious and largely unverified allegations about then-candidate Trump and others around him that was compiled by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm’s bank records, obtained by House investigators, revealed that the project was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Strzok may have been the person stonewalling the inquiries into the dossier:
Strzok himself briefed the committee on Dec. 5, 2016, the sources said, but within months of that session House Intelligence Committee investigators were contacted by an informant suggesting that there was “documentary evidence” that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the dossier.
In early October, Nunes personally asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who has overseen the Trump-Russia probe since the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions – to make Strzok available to the committee for questioning, sources said.
While Strzok’s removal from the Mueller team had been publicly reported in August, the Justice Department never disclosed the anti-Trump texts to the House investigators. The denial of access to Strzok was instead predicated, sources said, on broad “personnel” grounds.
It does appear that the Trump-hating Strzok was assigned to “take care of” the clinton email investigation and then “take care” of Trump:
In late July [2016], the F.B.I. opened an investigation into possible collusion between members of Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. Besides Mr. Comey and a small team of agents, officials said, only a dozen or so people at the F.B.I. knew about the investigation. Mr. Strzok, just days removed from the Clinton case, was selected to supervise it.
This is what a cover up smells like. There’s more.
Mueller’s team is chock full of democrat supporters:
After being appointed late last month by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to head a Special Counsel investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, in addition to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election through propaganda and fake news, former FBI Director Bob Mueller has been rounding up attorneys in Washington D.C. to assemble his team.
But according to an assessment done by CNN, those hired so far are mostly Democrat donors. Two already on board gave the max amount to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Andrew McCabe, number 2 man at the FBI, is up to his eyes in conflicts of interest:
Just prior to that PAC money went into Jill McCabe’s campaign, Hillary Clinton did a campaign fundraiser event for the very PAC (Common Good VA) that would soon shovel that money into the campaign of the wife of the FBI agent was promoted as the Clinton investigation began and who within a month would be put in charge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
And then there’s James Comey. All of his integrity was destroyed when he gave hillary clinton a drive by appearance at the FBI, failed to interview her under oath, failed to record anything, and exonerated her long before the “interview.” And that’s before we get to the part in which Comey leaked classified information to WaPo. Trump is absolutely right when he speaks of a double standard at the FBI. But you heard that here already.
And we have to uncover the biggest gem of them all- was the dossier created and then used to get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign? We also still have to learn who accelerated the unmasking of the Trump campaign and why. Strzok’s hatred of Trump compromises the legitimacy of Mueller’s entire operation.
This investigation is so ridden with cancer that it demands its own investigation.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.