Dumbstrzok

BREAKING: Peter Strzok, the FBI agent accused by GOP of having "treasonous" anti-Trump bias, supported re-opening the Clinton email investigation in fall 2016 and helped write the letter (signed by Comey) that was released days before the election. https://t.co/RkOIkZ2x6W

— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) January 31, 2018

This is really too much.  This was kind of my first hypothesis about the case of extremely senior agent Strzok last August, after he became a mini-Trumprussia celebrity when he was taken off the Trump-Russia investigation and exiled to the FBI's personnel department, either as punishment for some blunder or to separate him from some security issue, and I began learning that Strzok had played some kind of central role in Rudy Giuliani's October Surprise of 2016.

That, you'll remember, was when Rudy Giuliani seemed to have some weird advance knowledge of something "up our sleeves" that was going to turn the expected Clinton landslide upside down, and a couple of days later FBI director James Comey informed Congress that the investigation of the Clinton private email server she had used as secretary of state (sort of against State Department rules), which had seemed to be closed since Comey made the extremely unusual announcement in June 2016 that Clinton had done nothing prosecutable (though she had acted with "extreme carelessness"), was in fact not closed, and weasel congressman Jason Chaffetz quickly leaked this to the public, and press reports began surfacing that there was new evidence in the form of emails that had been downloaded to a laptop owned by the disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner by his then wife, Hillary Clinton's close assistant Huma Abedin, that seemed to have been moved from the Secretary of State's private server, perhaps for printing, and while the Bureau managed heroically to check this all out within a week and inform the public that there wasn't anything interesting to be said about these emails after all, Clinton's poll standings didn't recover, and Trump somehow won the election by minus three million votes.

So what I had learned, from the Trumprussia blog Narrativ, was that that very same mysteriously demoted agent Strzok had been in New York that week, working with the agents of the New York field office (including Giuliani's buddy agent Jim Kallstrom) in the investigation of the Abedin laptop; he was the one who had interviewed Clinton, on November 4, and I wrote:

If Special Counsel Mueller were to learn, in the course of his investigations, that one of his top investigators had been deeply involved in that anti-Clinton crusade as a rogue FBI agent, to the point of revealing information about the investigation to Giuliani, in clear violation of the Hatch Act, then Mueller would have to get that person off the team, and the FBI would have to remove him from investigative work pending the outcome of an internal investigation in which they decided how to discipline him and whether to prosecute him for the crime.

Then I started thinking maybe Strzok was a hero, sent from Washington to rein in the rogues who had forced Comey to make this terribly damaging announcement, and then it turned out, in December, that Strzok had had a girlfriend, although he was married, with whom he had exchanged many text messages in the course of their relationship, some of them mentioning the fact that Trump is an idiot, and that was the reason Comey had sent him into exile, because it was unacceptable for there to be any suspicion that any FBI personnel should exhibit any sort of personal opinion about a politician under investigation, making the Bureau look biased.

Whereupon the Republicans reacted in the obvious way by claiming that the FBI was biased.

So now we find that

While Strzok was removed from the Mueller probe last year, he also was deeply involved in the Clinton investigation and sought to pursue it "aggressively," according to the source familiar with Strzok's thinking.

In an October 27, 2016, email the FBI provided to congressional investigators, Strzok informs his colleagues he and another FBI agent had drafted "the first cut" of the letter notifying Congress of the decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. His colleagues then exchanged two additional emails referencing further comments and changes to Strzok's initial draft, which was ultimately forwarded to Comey by then-FBI chief of staff James Rybicki.

This is a lot funnier as a joke on Republicans than anything else, obviously: Har har har, Peter Strzok, author of anti-Trump text messages, was so biased against Trump that he got him elected. But really, with House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes determined to release his "memo" offering "proof" of the ineluctable bias of the entire FBI against our president, sometime tomorrow, how exactly is it going to play?

Stay tuned, huh?

Image by AreWeHavingSexWithYourMomYet.