Strzok’s new book, obtained by POLITICO ahead of its release next week, recaps the full arc of Crossfire Hurricane from the perspective of an enterprising counterintelligence expert who perceived Donald Trump and his campaign team not necessarily as criminals but as compromised by a foreign adversary. By late May 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller had taken over the Russia probe and its many offshoots, including the Trump counterintelligence case, and Strzok was leading the 40-or-so FBI agents on loan to the special counsel’s office. So Strzok’s team, with permission from then-deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, opened a counterintelligence case on the president that proved far more complicated than many at the FBI had anticipated. So the question was not just did he lie — it was, did he lie because he was covering for the president of the United States, who had made a deal with the Russians to help get elected? You can unsubscribe at any time and you can contact us here. He notes in his book that FBI and DOJ leaders had distanced themselves so much from the Russia investigation by early 2018 that one FBI senior executive, deliberately out of the loop, referred to Manafort as “Manifold” during an internal FBI town hall. “But the totality of Steele’s material, along with all we had collected by the time we reviewed it, ended debate as to whether we had probable cause” for a surveillance warrant on Page. The investigation began as a pure counterintelligence inquiry — an attempt to understand who, if anyone, on Trump’s campaign team had been offered help by Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton. “I’m sorry, Pete,” came the response. Peter Strzok, who was still an FBI employee that day in January 2018 and couldn’t respond to the president’s attack, was appealing to his boss: “The bureau can’t let this stand,” he pleaded. Strzok and the other agent knew the truth when they interviewed Flynn: that he had asked Kislyak for Russia to hold off on retaliating for the new sanctions the Obama administration had imposed in response to the Kremlin’s election interference. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo, "I’m sorry to bother you. Fired FBI agent Peter Strzok has been hired as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. The mystery of the missing Trump probe deepened this week when The New York Times reported that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had made sure that a counterintelligence investigation never happened, ordering Mueller to narrow his investigation to finding crimes and refrain from looking into the president’s finances. “At the end of the day, the big issue is not whether Flynn lied,” Strzok says. The DOJ released a letter revealing some juicy exchanges between former FBI Counterintel chief Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI lawyer Lisa Page.. Recall, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were both dismissed from the Mueller investigation in the summer of 2017 after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found out the two were having an extramarital affair. The former FBI agent at the center of the Russia probe is finally having his say. The latest breaking news, ... Peter Strzok says FBI wondered if Trump was 'Manchurian candidate' US politics. . It outlined the Trump’s campaign’s extensive contacts with Kremlin-linked actors before, during, and after the election, and led to dozens of indictments and multiple guilty pleas and convictions, including of Manafort. But he emphasized how suspicious he and other senior FBI leaders were of Rosenstein’s motivations, and recalled a meeting he had with the deputy attorney general just before Mueller’s appointment that “raised alarm bells in my head.” Rosenstein asked Strzok to stay behind after an intelligence community briefing about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and asked about the FBI’s case on Trump campaign associates. After nearly two years, Mueller released his final report in April 2019. Four months into Trump’s presidency, according to Strzok, the discussion at the bureau had shifted from whether a case on Trump should be opened at all to whether there were any compelling arguments against it. But it turns out Trump just accused me of treason.”. Because at some point, we're going to have to start to go out and get all those financial documents,” Strzok recalled. The suspicions that a broader conspiracy was at work extended to the president’s then-national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. As the past two presidents have done, Democrat Joe Biden plans a mass of executive orders to enact his agenda, these des . Fired FBI agent Peter Strzok has been hired as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. “There are a lot of ways to do that, whether that’s in the government or outside of it. In Strzok and Page's texts they vowed they would stop President Donald Trump's election, but an independent investigation showed they did nothing illegal. The probe kicked off with a tip from an Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who told the FBI he had heard from a Trump campaign staffer about a Russian overture to the campaign after the leak of hacked Democratic National Committee emails. In the “worst case, and we still haven’t eliminated this possibility,” he said, “Flynn didn’t tell us the truth because he was covering for Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.”, Would it be occurring now? by … | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images. But evidence was never uncovered showing that Trump had ordered Flynn to allay the Russians’ fears about the sanctions.). “We were still trying to figure out how high the threat went, and whether Rosenstein was going to order Andy [McCabe] to close all these investigations.”. “Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. The former FBI agent was fired after anti-Trump text messages between himself and FBI attorney Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, were made public. “My thinking before I left was: We can do this, but it’s going to be big, take a ton of resources, and it’s going to be supernoisy. But by the time they figured that out, Trump had been elected president — and Strzok’s team had uncovered so many suspicious contacts and communications between the campaign and Russians that they began debating whether to open a case on Trump himself. Fanning the flames was a DOJ inspector general report that found more than a dozen problems with surveillance warrants FBI agents had filed to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which Strzok still believes was justified — “the facts we understood about Page were more than sufficient to initiate the warrant,” he wrote, citing Page’s past links to Russian intelligence officers “who appeared to have been attempting to groom him as an asset.” The fact that the CIA had at one point been debriefing Page on his contacts with the Russian intelligence officers did not change that assessment, Strzok says. Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. Former FBI agent Peter Strozk has been hired by Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is currently teaching a course on counterintelligence.Strzok was one of the lead agents on the Crossfire Hurricane probe, which investigated the 2016 Trump campaign on allegations of image caption Strzok was fired from the FBI after his anti-Trump texts emerged In January 2017, Peter Strzok sat in a room at FBI headquarters debating a decision that entered uncharted territory. Peter Strzok’s new book recaps the full arc of Crossfire Hurricane from the perspective of an enterprising counterintelligence expert who perceived Donald Trump and his campaign team not necessarily as criminals but as compromised by a foreign adversary. “I was trying and struggling to figure out the right way to staff this and dive into it in an effective way,” Strzok said. So why interview Flynn at all if you knew the truth, the FBI’s critics have asked, and if you weren’t simply trying to trap him in a lie? “I have a lot of energy and expertise left, and a lot of desire to help and continue to protect America and a desire to do that in a meaningful way,” he said, when asked whether he’d join a Joe Biden administration. In Strzok’s telling, by May 16, 2017, there weren’t. “The big issue is why Flynn didn’t tell the truth, and whether there was a greater involvement in that lie by others at the White House.”. | Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images. That summer, the FBI told him he’d been on a list compiled by a man named Cesar Sayoc, who at the time had been sending pipe bombs to Trump’s critics. The warrant had been supplemented by hotly disputed intelligence the bureau had received on Page from the British former spy and longtime FBI source Christopher Steele, which Strzok also defends. The decision wasn’t just personally embarrassing, Strzok has claimed, it was also dangerous. We couldn’t be certain that this was Flynn acting on his own.”, (According to Mueller, Flynn hadn’t simply gone rogue — in an interview with the special counsel’s office, Flynn said he waited to speak to Kislyak about the sanctions until he could consult with his team. Fired FBI agent Peter Strzok has been hired as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.