I was able to have the Thursday congressional hearings up on the TV in my office while working at my desk. These were the hearings where the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, the ones concerned with the FBI and Justice Department, brought in Peter Strzok, the disgraced former executive at the FBI, to talk about his bias in the Clinton email and Russian election interference cases.
You have probably seen enough clips to where I don't need to get into either why he was there, or what he said during the very lengthy questioning period, as about 70 or so congressmen had the opportunity to alternately grill him and over-praise him.
What struck me the most, however, was the attitude displayed by Strzok on the stand, an attitude that was there from his opening statement to the end of the questioning around dinnertime for those of us in the Eastern Time Zone.
This was pomposity rivaled only by people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the types who are utterly convinced that they are better than you and I are, and that by that fact and a position in government, they have an unalienable right to act as though they are better. Strzok certainly had a position in government, he was a Senior Executive Service person, a sort of "flag officer-level" type in the civil service world.
I've probably pointed out in multiple pieces on this site when the swamp is out there in all its full glory, the seemingly God-given right to one's position and to lord it over others. It is omnipresent in the Senate, where getting reelected every six years without fear of term limits is often assured, and with that assurance brings a sense of nobility that would make our Founders cringe.
Strzok is not a senator, but you might have thought so from the lecturing he periodically gave congressmen trying to get him to explain how he could have written the tens of thousands of texts to his mistress, many of which displayed intense passion against Donald Trump, including after Trump became his ultimate boss, and yet been a fair investigator into our current president's activities -- and those of the candidate he defeated.
I was certainly taken by what seemed like his "right" to sit there for hours and lie about something that probably cannot be proven by evidence -- his claim that despite his intense hatred of the president, he was able to lead an investigation into the Russian meddling probe and into Hillary Clinton's abuse of classified information without bias.
I could prefer to have seen him trying to sit there and quietly insist that, with over twenty years at the FBI, he was very capable of simply going where the evidence led, no matter what his views were. I could have seen him apologetically conceding in an opening statement that he probably, on hindsight, should have steered clear of involvement in a case where his biases would be so impactful.
But that's not what we got. We got, when the FBI lawyers allowed him to speak (why was the FBI defending him?), defiant insistence that he was fair and impartial and prepared simply to follow the evidence, as any other investigation would go. We got attitude, and not in a good way.
What we got was the swamp creature in full flower, defiant, entitled and pompous as you please, all-knowing and self-righteous.
When the swamp is finally drained, God willing and Trump-dependent, it will be rather pleasant to see Peter Strzok in the vortex, washed out into the metaphorical sea. The government will be the better for it.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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