officials say, that anyone at the FBI ever saw Trump's tax returns or looked into whether he borrowed money from Russian oligarchs - something many Americans assumed was happening during the Mueller probe. Strzok said in an interview published Friday in The Atlantic that he believed the FBI's counterintelligence inquiries into Trump "largely died on the vine," which two people familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News. But Strzok writes that at the time he left the investigation in 2017, "we were still looking for the right way to investigate those counterintelligence concerns."Ī recent assessment by the House Intelligence Committee, which has sought classified briefings on the matter, says the FBI " has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump's foreign financial ties." Strzok, 50, an Army veteran who worked most of his two-decade FBI career chasing Russian spies, says it was the job of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Who was supposed to answer that counterintelligence question? Who would look at whether Trump had, in fact, benefited from massive investments by Russians, as his son once said he did? Or whether there was any reason to think Putin could blackmail him? ![]() Whether crimes were committed is a different question from whether Russia had a hold over the president, however. In his report, Mueller said he couldn't find enough evidence to bring criminal charges alleging such a conspiracy, even as he punted on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. Of the four original subjects of Crossfire Hurricane - former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign aide George Papadopoulos and former campaign adviser Carter Page - two, Manafort and Papadopoulos, went to prison, and a third, Flynn, pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing amid a legal dispute over whether his case should be dismissed.īut none of them - and no other American - was accused of conspiring with Russia. "In my view, they were most likely a collection of grifters pursuing individual personal interests: their own money- and power-driven agendas." "I was skeptical that all the different threads amounted to anything more than bumbling incompetence, a confederacy of dunces who were too dumb to collude," Strzok writes, summing up his view of the case for a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia before he was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation in July 2017 over his biased texts. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., speaks while aides hold up posters of people who have entered guilty pleas in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election before Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of the FBI, testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill on July 12, 2018. To the contrary, as he tells it, career public servants inside the FBI and the Justice Department were gobsmacked in 2016 by what they uncovered about a presidential campaign that seemed to find unlimited time to meet with Russians, practically inviting exploitation by a foreign adversary. But his insider account provides a detailed refutation of the notion that a group of anti-Trump denizens of the deep state cooked up the Russia "hoax," as Trump likes to call it, to take down a president they didn't support. Trump."ĭespite the cinematic title, Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia. According to the Journal, this person told investigators that Mar-a-Lago contained classified documents beyond the 15 boxes the National Archives retrieved from Trump's residence back in February.Now Peter Strzok, a decorated counterintelligence agent who was fired by the bureau he loved, is telling his story in a new book, "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. The Journal said it talked to anonymous sources familiar with the matter who said a person who knew where the papers were stored had been in touch with investigators. ![]() The report from Newsweek was matched by reporting from the Journal. One Newsweek source, an unnamed senior Justice Department official, described that plan as a "spectacular backfire" because of the backlash the raid got among Trump's supporters. Newsweek's sources also said the raid was timed to take place while Trump was away to try to avoid giving the former president a photo op and to lower the profile of the raid. The person was also said to have pinpointed exactly where the documents were. ![]() Newsweek said it talked to two senior government officials with knowledge of the raid, who said a person told law enforcement that Trump still had certain documents in his possession. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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