WASHINGTON -- A former senior FBI agent at the center of the investigations into Hillary Clinton's email server and the Trump campaign's ties to Russia defends the handling of the inquiries and declares President Donald Trump a national security threat in a new memoir, while admitting that the
WASHINGTON — A former senior FBI agent at the center of the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia defends the handling of the inquiries and declares President Donald Trump a national security threat in a new memoir, while admitting that the bureau made mistakes that upended the 2016 presidential election.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, found the bureau had sufficient reason to open the inquiry and found no evidence of political bias. He said in a report that he found no evidence that Strzok’s political views affected the FBI’s work but that he was “deeply troubled” by the texts.
Strzok has sued the Justice Department and FBI, alleging that his dismissal was politically motivated. He says he was opposed for both “practical and philosophical arguments.” Eventually, the FBI did begin investigating the president after he fired James Comey as its director in May 2017, a step that also prompted the appointment of a special counsel.
When Mueller removed Strzok from the team after learning about his texts attacking the president, “we were still looking for the right way to investigate those counterintelligence concerns,” Strzok writes. But investigators’ pursuit of the matter withered after Strzok left, in part because the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, had instructed Mueller earlier to focus on possible crimes. Counterintelligence investigations look for possible threats to national security.
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