This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
At this point Issa tells Strzok he is indeed a target of investigation by Congress. More importantly, Issa makes the point that the content of the texts exchanged on the FBI phones contained a mixture of official business and personal matters.
So why, asks Issa, should we not ask you to provide similar texts from your personal exchanges, since there is likely to be a similar mixture of official and personal matters in those texts? Issa suggests they likely "would be similar."
Strzok asks if, by "similar," Issa means "commenting on Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton or anything else political in nature." Strzok then adds, "I don't specifically recall but it is probably a safe assumption."
Uh oh.
Strzok: No Good Options
If Strzok was distracted by texting during the standard briefing on "NSA Capabilities: 101," he may have missed the part about NSA collecting and storing everything that goes over the Internet. That would include, of course, his private text messages with Page on private phones.
There is, admittedly, a very slim chance Strzok is unaware of this. But, given his naivete' about how well protected the texts on his FBI cellphone were, that possibility cannot be ruled out. In any case, given the high stakes involved, there seems a chance he might be tempted to follow Mrs. Clinton's example with her emails and try to delete or destroy texts that provide additional incriminating evidence -- or get someone else to do so.
More probably, after Thursday's hearing, Strzok will see it as too late for him to try to cash in on the "Hillary Exemption." Strzok, after all, is not Hillary Clinton. In addition, it has probably long since dawned on him that his FBI and DOJ co-conspirators may well decide to "throw him under the bus," one of those delicate expressions we use in Washington. In this connection, Strzok will have noted that last month McCabe asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to give him immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony on how senior officials at the FBI and Justice Department handled the investigation of Mrs. Clinton's private email server.
If McCabe knows FBI history, he is aware that one of his predecessors as acting director, L. Patrick Gray, famously was left to "twist slowly in the wind" per the instructions of President Richard Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman, when the Senate Judiciary Committee could not get satisfactory answers from Gray.
Nixon had nominated Gray to lead the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972, but he could never get confirmed by the Senate. Worse still, Gray was forced to resign after less than a year as acting FBI director, after he admitted to having destroyed Watergate-related documents.
Predictable Media Spin
The "mainstream media" remain the main obstacle to understanding what is going on behind the scenes. It would be easier to forgive them, were not a full-blown Constitutional crisis brewing the Executive and Legislature branches, as the DOJ and FBI continue to resist Congress's requests for original documents. Former CIA chief John Brennan is also being given space to indulge in pre-emptive rhetoric that he apparently thinks will help when they get to him.
The New York Times reported Friday that "Peter Strzok ... was hauled before the House but came out swinging. ... The embattled F.B.I. agent who oversaw the opening of the Russia investigation mounted an aggressive defense of himself and the F.B.I. on Thursday, rejecting accusations that he let his private political views bias his official actions and labeling Republicans' preoccupation with him 'another victory notch in Putin's belt.'"
The Potomac Times (aka The Washington Post) ran similarly laudatory coverage of Strzok -- "Strzok testifies amid partisan fury: heated hearing sheds little light as agent fumes at accusations of FBI bias" -- and laced its coverage with a defamatory article about Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who led the most aggressive Republican questioning of Strzok.
According to the Times, Jordan is "under withering scrutiny as he faces numerous accusations that he knew or should have known about the alleged sexual misconduct of a doctor who worked with the Ohio State wrestling team when Jordan was an assistant coach there between 1986 and 1995." The Times goes on to quote House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): "Well, many people say that he did know and by his own standard, he should have known."
And, sadly, do not look to so-called progressive media for more balanced reporting. For example, Democracy Now! Friday morning chose to highlight Strzok's tortured explanation of what he really meant when he told Page, "We will stop" Trump. Strzok says the "we" he referred to was "the American population [which] would not elect somebody" who behaves like Trump. The context of that text exchange, however, makes it clear who the "we" is -- or was.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
