Excoriating FBI Agent Peter Strzok

Once upon a time I aspired to become an FBI agent. I was finishing law school and tried to apply to join the Bureau.

My application was summarily rejected because those were the Good Old Days when women just weren’t allowed to join male sanctuaries.

Ultimately, just after the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU agreed to represent me in an action against the Bureau, the FBI magically announced that it would finally accept women in its ranks and invited me to apply.

I was interviewed—lackadaisically—and rejected. No doubt for being a potential troublemaker.

And ironically I would have made a pretty good agent. Or so I’ve always liked to think.

Not too many years ago I was able to communicate with another woman who also tried to join the Bureau. Like me, she was too short—by a couple of inches—to satisfy the old exclusionary 5’8” requirement for agents. Of course, neither of us was short for full-grown females. Such requirements existed in order to exclude us and encourage exclusively male applicants.

For readers who were not yet born or grown in the sixties and seventies, height requirements were used to prevent women from becoming police officers, firefighters, and god knows what else.

Civil rights laws gradually made a difference, although the numbers have never reached real parity over the years.

The second woman or a third woman who also wanted to join the FBI—and all three of us were attorneys, at that time a requirement—was actually on trial to force the FBI to consider her employment application when the FBI must have realized the jig was up and made its less-than-earth-shattering announcement that women were inherently as capable as men of performing an FBI agent’s job.

Today that confluence of affairs would have been identifiable on the Internet, and we three female aspirants could have communicated with each other and planned a joint campaign to force the FBI to at least seriously consider our employment.

But, again, those were the Good Old Days when the Information Highway had not yet been created.

Hence, I have always paid more than token attention to the FBI, and watched a good part of yesterday’s House Judiciary and Oversight Committees’ public questioning of FBI agent Peter Strzok with a good deal of interest.

Strzok, the top counterintelligence agent in the Bureau, was removed from oversight or participation in the Mueller Russia investigation last month.

The reason Robert Mueller removed Strzok? It was revealed that Strzok had used his FBI cell phone to text his former girlfriend ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page on hundreds of occasions dating back to 2015 with mostly anti-Trump messages right up to election day November 9, 2016.

Mueller apparently realized immediately that the anti-Trump texts appeared to indicate partiality even though Strzok had actually behaved impeccably and without prejudice in his work on the Russia investigation.

Strzok was strongly anti-Trump (and anti-Bernie Sanders, anti-Martin O’Malley, anti-Ben Carson, and anti-Mitch McConnell). In March 2015 after Page texted “God trump is a loathsome human,” Strzok answered, “Yet he may win.”

During the Republican National Convention, Page and Strzok “goaded each other” to watch the proceedings. “TURN IT ON, TURN IT ON!!! THE DOUCHEBAGS ARE ABOUT TO COME OUT,” texted Strzok. Many additional negative texts—often containing profanities—followed in quick succession.

By August 2016 Strzok was texting, “What the hell has happened to our country!?!?!??,” days later adding that he was “worried about what Trump is encouraging in our behavior.” When he went to a Walmart in southern Virginia, Strzok texted that he could “SMELL the Trump support. . . .” Not a description to please the bloodthirsty Republicans with seats in the current House, several of whom excoriated Strzok for this slur during yesterday’s hearing.

Strzok described a story about Trump interacting with Vladimir Putin by texting “What an utter idiot.” When Lisa Page expressed the wish that Paul Ryan would “fall and crash in a blaze of glory,” Strzok answered, “Yes. And me too. At some point the Rep party needs to pull their head out of their *ss. Shows no sign of occurring any time soon.”

Among other texts, Strzok was asked to explain Page’s text question, “[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" to which Strzok replied, "No. No he's not. We'll stop it." At yesterday’s all-day hearing, GOP Committee members tried to strongarm Strzok into admitting that these remarks proved he was part of a concerted campaign to somehow derail the Trump campaign.

After being questioned aggressively and repeatedly about that text, Strzok explained during the Committee’s hearing that:

“In terms of the texts that 'we will stop it,' you need to understand that was written late at night, off-the-cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be President of the United States.”

As a CNN reporter describes the scene that followed this explanation, “[a]t the conclusion of his remarks, several Democratic members of the committees audibly cheered.”

At one point during often his tumultuous exchanges with GOP lawmakers, Strzok had pointedly indicated that “I am here under oath, I am not lying, I have never lied under oath, and I never will.” Nor did it appear that he had lied. He showed courage and commitment throughout the efforts of the GOP to humiliate and chastise him.

In the end Agent Peter Strzok countered the multiple attacks on him during a 10-hour televised piling on by Republican members of the House with tremendous stamina, verve, passion, and resoluteness. He would not be moved although he admitted that the appearance of impropriety or partiality caused by the content of his texts with Page made his removal from the Russia investigation necessary and appropriate.

Near the end of the hearing, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) succinctly summarized that

“This hearing is a kangaroo court. It is a three-ring circus. It is not even meritorious of an investigation by Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, let alone 75 members of the United States Congress. Let’s stop wasting taxpayer dollars and get back to the business of the American people.”

Amen.

So let’s hear it for the FBI agent who toughed it out against GOP congressmen who tried to cut out his heart and his liver on live television, and were thwarted by Strzok’s elan and endurance, plus an absolute commitment to the Rule of Law—qualities from which many Republicans could learn a good deal.

As one commentator described the exhaustive live hearing, “Peter Strzok just gave a hard-to-rebut defense of the objectivity of the Russia investigation’s origins.”

Those of us who still value and revere our democracy would like to think so.