Peter Strzok was an FBI agent that played such a pivotal role in the Russia investigation his codename was “Crossfire Hurricane.”
He is the same agent whose anti-Trump texts on a government phone as well as “intimate” conversations with an FBI lawyer who was married to someone else gave Trump much need ammunition in his efforts to discredit the investigation.
Now Strzok, who is a decorated counterintelligence agent that found himself in the middle of a scandal and fired from the bureau that he had dedicated much of his life to has penned a book.
“Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump” doesn’t reveal any new evidence about how Trump was a tool for Russia, but it does provide an insider’s account and a detailed look at the notion that a group of anti-Trump “denizens” created the Russian “hoax” to take down Trump.
His new book details how his career as a public servant inside the FBI and the Justice Department was literally destroyed in 2016 by what they uncovered about Trump’s presidential campaign.
“I was skeptical that all the different threads amounted to anything more than bumbling incompetence, a confederacy of dunces who were too dumb to collude,” Strzok writes. “In my view, they were most likely a collection of grifters pursuing individual personal interests: their own money- and power-driven agendas.”
Strzok wrote that he also believed that even if Trump didn’t formally conspire with the Russian election interference operation, Trump was seriously compromised. He was compromised, Strzok writes, “because of his questionable business dealings, the hush money paid on his behalf to silence women, shady transactions at his charity and, most importantly, his lies about his Russia dealings.”
“Putin knew he had lied. And Trump knew that Putin knew — a shared understanding that provided the framework for a potentially coercive relationship between the president of the United States and the leader of one of our greatest adversaries,” Strzok wrote.
“This simple fact could explain something that made no sense otherwise: why Trump repeatedly … (chose) the course of action that made little sense in the context of U.S. national security but that clearly benefitted Russia,” he added.
Brian Morgenstern, a White House spokesperson, called Strzok’s account “utter nonsense” and argued that neither Mueller nor Congress “have found any wrongdoing by the President.” He then added: “Strzok is a joke, and his book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”
