New York Times: Former FBI agent calls Trump a national security threat in new book
Peter Strzok, the fired former FBI agent who played a senior role in the early Russia-Trump campaign investigation, called President Donald Trump a national security threat in his new book, the New York Times reports.
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New York Times: Former FBI agent calls Trump a national security threat in new book
By Jessica Campisi, CNN
Updated 8:56 AM ET, Sun September 6, 2020
FBI Agent Peter Strzok arrives at a closed door interview before the House Judiciary Committee June 27, 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Strzok, a former member of the Mueller Russia investigation team, is being interviewed by the committee on text messages exchanged with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page during the Clinton e-mail server investigation that are claimed by President Trump's supporters to show bias against the president. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
(CNN)Peter Strzok, the fired former FBI agent who played a senior role in the early Russia-Trump campaign investigation, called President Donald Trump a national security threat in his new book, the New York Times reports.
In the memoir, according to the Times, the investigations that Strzok oversaw showed the President's "willingness to accept political assistance from an opponent like Russia — and, it follows, his willingness to subvert everything America stands for."
"That's not patriotic," Mr. Strzok writes in the book. "It's the opposite."
Strzok claimed that his termination in August 2018 came because of political pressure on the FBI from Trump after he criticized the President and made political comments in text messages in 2016.
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In summer 2017, former special counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from his team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election after an internal investigation first revealed texts with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom Strzok had an extramarital affair, that could be read as exhibiting political bias.
Lawmakers received several tranches of recovered messages between Strzok and Page in 2018, including several messages referring to Trump.
Strzok has sued the Justice Department, claiming his termination in August 2018 came because of political pressure on the FBI from Trump.
In the book, Strzok asserts that he wasn't part of an FBI effort to hurt the President. Instead, he says the operation aimed to investigate "a credible allegation of foreign intelligence to see where it led," according to the memoir.
"It started with Russia, and it was always about Russia," Strzok writes.
When the bureau did eventually open its investigation, following Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey, Strzok recounted briefing Mueller and outlining the "dizzyingly complicated portrait of foreign interference," the Times reports.
"And on top of it all, at the pinnacle of this heap of perfidy and treachery, sat a president who had lied to the public, cozied up to Russia, and, once he became aware of them, attempted to block our investigation at every turn," Strzok writes.
Strzok also writes in his book that the FBI wasn't prepared for Russia's interference in the 2016 election, claiming the bureau should have followed the warning signs.
The government was not "collaborating as effectively as we should have been," he writes.
This story has been updated with additional details from the New York Times report.
CNN's Katelyn Polantz and Caroline Kelly contributed to this report.
