Can someone explain how FBI Agent Peter Strzok has not yet been forced to appear before the House Intelligence Committee on national television? Actually, scratch that. We’d just like to know how in the hell this guy still has a job. Because it seems to us that his fingerprints were all over two botched investigations: The one into Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server and the one into Donald Trump’s nonexistent collusion with the Russians. And given what he wrote in several hundred text messages to his little girlfriend at the FBI, Strzok presided over those investigations while harboring a serious grudge against Trump.
Did it color his investigative work? Well, you be the judge.
According to a new report from Fox News, Strzok was told that an irregularity in the metadata of Clinton’s server could suggest that it was breached at some point by hackers. This should have been a major warning sign for agents looking into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, to say nothing of something Strzok should have kicked over to the CIA or the NSA, since it could have been a foreign government like…um, Russia! Instead, “there was no significant follow up, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.”
Strzok, according to these sources, was informed of the metadata problem in 2016, shortly before James Comey exonerated Hillary for her crimes. Strzok said that he did “not support a formal damage assessment,” which is a procedure that intelligence agencies are supposed to carry out when national security information is compromised. As we learned throughout the Clinton investigation, of course, the former secretary of state kept many emails marked classified on the server – messages that would have likely been of intense interest to America’s geopolitical foes, to say nothing of potential Clinton blackmailers.
What’s really interesting here is that Strzok was one of the FBI officials involved in editing and guiding Comey’s statement on the case, which was in the drafting process months before the Bureau concluded the investigation. As was revealed much later, Comey wrote in early drafts of that speech that it was “reasonably likely that hostile actors” hacked into Clinton’s unsecured server. In later drafts – undoubtedly nudged on by Strzok and other biased forces in the Justice Department – Comey changed the wording to say that it was only “possible” that this had occurred.
In the final speech, Comey told the American people that the FBI had no “direct evidence” that such tampering had taken place. Perhaps if his agents had actually bothered to look for that evidence, Comey would have been able to say more.
