A Strzok of Evil Intent

Darrell Issa (R-CA), the California congressman, is not a guy you would want to meet up with in a dark alley.  He has a pretty intimidating presence about him, but a lot of that is because, for the most part, he is smarter than you are and can verbally rip you to shreds.  I mean, I think I'm pretty good with language, but in his hands it can be lethal.

And I'm glad he's on our side.

So last week, Issa was seated along with fellow members of the House Judiciary committee, taking testimony from Christopher Wray, the recently-appointed Director of the FBI.  The FBI, of course, has been the subject of some harsh words after the unexpected news was discovered that there was some bias at the Bureau.

Specifically, it was made public that Peter Strzok, a senior-level fellow at the FBI, had been thrown off the investigative team of Robert Mueller, the special counsel on the RussiaRussiaRussia investigationinvestigationinvestigation, which to date has come up with exactly nothingnothingnothing.  Strzok had been removed after it came to light that he had written about 10,000 texts to a colleague at the FBI, who it turns out he was having an affair with, and a bunch of those texts were blatantly anti-Donald Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton.

That news was only 3-4 days old when the committee was hearing from Director Wray, and it was naturally a significant topic of conversation, even though the removal of Strzok and his transfer to a position in HR had occurred prior to Wray's tenure beginning.

So the turn comes around to Rep. Issa, and he starts out by asking whether political opinions could get an agent transferred or removed.  Wray properly answered "no", and I started to wonder where Issa was going, knowing it was going to be somewhere interesting.  After another question or two confirming that it was perfectly fine for FBI agents to have political opinions, Issa dropped his bomb.

Obviously, he said, if political opinions were a disqualification from serving on the investigation of a prominent political figure, in the case President Trump, "no one on the Mueller team would be left", as they all seem to have been donors to the Obama or Hillary campaigns, in most cases maxed out on contributions.

And that's where I picked up on what Issa was driving at.  If opinions were perfectly fine, and all the investigators and lawyers on the special counsel's team were Democrat donors, then what made Strzok any different to the point that he was canned from the investigation and moved to HR?

Naturally, Wray was not able to answer, and when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) followed up somewhat later with some pretty strongly worded follow-up questions with the same intent, asking the same thing about why the rest had stayed but Strzok was canned, his queries gave a little more coal to the fire.

You see, aside from the existence of the Mueller investigation and the extreme leftist bent of the leads on it, there is the question of how it got started.  And there is a growing suspicion, backed by the facts, that the origin was in the fake dossier on then-candidate Trump.  That is the one initiated by the Democratic National Committee hiring a lawyer to coordinate opposition research, who in turn hired the firm Fusion GPS, who in turn hired a British agent named Steele to get Russians of some stripe to fabricate Enquirer-level stories about Trump.

That dossier, even though it was phony, somehow was used by the FBI in its application to the FISA Court to unmask the names of certain Americans, which is how Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was pulled into this in the first place.  Rep. Jordan was pretty animated about it, but he had a very straightforward request.  He knew that the FISA Court's activities were classified, but the process of petitioning them (as opposed to content) was certainly not.

Can you tell this committee, Jordan asked Wray, if Peter Strzok was the FBI person who prepared and submitted the application to the FISA Court?  That was not classified data, Jordan insisted, but merely a part of the process.  And if Strzok was the one who put together the application with information that was known to be false, could that have been the reason that he was thrown off the investigation?  And if all that was true, and the special counsel's activity was based on a lie in the first place, well, why was there even a Mueller investigation?

Wray, of course, did not answer the question directly, but indicated he would be willing to provide that answer as soon as he discovered what had happened.  But I'll tell you this -- President Trump tweeted last week that the reputation of the FBI was "in tatters", and if it turns out that an FBI agent was the one pressing a political agenda inside the agency, well, their reputation should take a hit.

And we should thank Reps. Issa and Jordan for asking.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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