President Trump in an interview on Thursday called the senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official who texted his lover about an insurance policy in the case of Trump’s election “treasonous.”
“A man is tweeting to his lover that if [Democrat Hillary Clinton] loses, we’ll essentially do the insurance policy. We’ll go to phase two and we’ll get this guy out of office,” Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“This is the FBI we’re talking about—that is treason,” he added. “That is a treasonous act. What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”
The official, Peter Strzok, had major roles in the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling and potential Trump campaign collusion, and had been assigned to the subsequent special counsel team until the text messages were discovered and he was removed.
The Justice Department inspector general, who is conducting an investigation into whether there was political bias in the FBI’s handling of the Clinton and Russia probes, discovered the text messages Strzok had sent to his lover, an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
The two last year during the 2016 presidential campaign season exchanged thousands of text messages that revealed they supported Clinton and detested Trump and had discussed an “insurance policy” in the case of his election.
Strzok texted to Page in August 2016: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration…that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
“People familiar with” Strzok’s text told the WSJ he meant the FBI had to aggressively investigate allegations of collusion, and that it was not intended to suggest a secret plan to harm his candidacy.
Strzok was the lead agent on the Clinton email investigation and had watered down language in a statement exonerating Clinton that might have had criminal implications for her.
Trump also said the U.S. is taking steps to ensure Russia and other countries do not try to influence future elections.
“We’re going to be very, very careful about Russia and about anybody else, by the way,” Trump told the paper.
He said his administration is working on different solutions and “all sorts of fail-safes.”
He also flatly denied any collusion with Russia, and said since there was no collusion crime, prosecutors were trying to say he obstructed justice for firing FBI Director James Comey.
“Of course there was no obstruction — there was no crime,” he said. “They make up a crime, and the crime doesn’t exist, and then they say obstruction.”
He said, rather, he should get credit for firing Comey, saying “everybody wanted Comey fired.”
“I should be given credit for having great insight,” he said.
Comey’s firing led to the special counsel probe, and for Democrats to argue that Trump obstructed justice by trying to fire Comey and squelch the FBI’s investigation.
A recent book, Fire and Fury, alleged that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter, insisted that he fire Comey and that “cosmopolitans” would welcome it, too.
Trump said his lawyers’ initial instinct was to fight the special counsel, but then after reviewing requested documents, decided to be open.
“They said, ‘You never did anything wrong,’” he said. “To be honest, they probably were surprised, as most lawyers would be.”
Mueller has told Trump’s lawyers that he may want to speak with the president in the near future, but Trump on Thursday would not commit to anything.
He said he hoped that investigations in Congress were nearing an end, and that Republicans would be strong and take charge.
Trump addressed former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s remarks that a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. took with Russians was “treasonous,” although Bannon later said his comments were directed to his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort.
“What he said about my son is horrible,” Trump said.
FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page his Horse. Look At the Teeth of that woman. Can you say Mister Ed?
House Oversight Committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said he is “convinced” that FBI officials used the salacious and false dossier about Donald Trump, paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to get “warrants to spy on Americans associated with Donald Trump’s campaign.”
Jordan added that the FBI could clear up this issue “if they release the application that they took to court,” but they refuse to do so. It has been reported that former Trump campaign officials Carter Pageand Paul Manafort were spied on in 2016 by U.S. intelligence agencies after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) granted warrants to do so.
Rep. Jordan, speaking on Lou Dobbs Tonight, said he believes it was FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok “who took the dossier” to the “FISA Court.” Strzok was working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller until this summer when his extra-marital affair and vehemently anti-Trump tweets were discovered; Strzok was reassigned to the FBI’s human resources department in August.
“He’s the guy who took the dossier, I believe,” Jordan told Dobbs, “or part of the team that took the dossier and took it to the FISA court. It’s the dossier that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. Paid [ex-British spy] Christopher Steele who paid Russians to put this false op together. He [Strzok] is the one I think who was working with others to put this together and take it to the court. That’s what we need to know.”
“This is why we need a second special counsel which we called for months ago,” said Jordan. “But every time we learn more, it just reinforces the idea that we need that second special counsel.”
In the beginning of his Dec. 7 interview of Rep. Jordan, host Lou Dobbs asked, “Congressman, you gave FBI Director [Christopher] Wray quite a grilling today. Are you satisfied with the answers that you elicited?”
Jordan said, “Well, I’ll be satisfied when they release the application that was taken to the FISA court. I’m convinced that most likely Peter Strzok was the guy who helped assembled that application, took it to the FISA where the court granted and that application was based on the dossier with all the garbage in it. That dossier was used as a basis for getting warrants to spy on Americans associated with Donald Trump’s campaign. So they can prove I’m wrong by releasing the application. I hope they do that.”
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is a Fraud. LOCK HIM UP!
“Lou, there are couple of fundamental questions here,” said Jordan. “Did the FBI pay [ex-British spy] Christopher Steele? I asked that of Attorney General Sessions two weeks ago, he wouldn’t answer the question. Did they actually vet this dossier, look at this dossier, go through this corroborative, corrected, look at it? Because it’s been disproven.”
“It’s a bunch of lies,” he said. “It’s a bunch of national enquirer garbage and fake news in this thing. Did they actually check it out before they took it to the FISA court which I’m convinced they do? Those are the sort of a fundamental questions.”
“And all this can get cleared up if they release the application that they took to the court,” said Jordan. “He [Wray] said he couldn’t do it, they’re allowed to do that. They can give it to the Judiciary Committee, the committee with oversight of the Justice Department. They can do that. That clears up a lot of things.”
“But I think they won’t give it to us, because they did take that to Steele,” said the congressman. “I think they did use the dossier as a basis for the warrants to spy on Americans associated with President Trump’s campaign.”
Lou Dobbs then remarked, “Your charges put it straightforwardly that the FBI leadership is corrupt and acted in corrupt and unlawful manner to achieve a political purpose.”
Congressman Jordan answered, “Think about [FBI agent] Peter Strzok, the guy who is dismissed from Mueller’s team, that’s what we learned this weekend. Here’s the guy who headed the Clinton investigation up, interviewed [Huma] Abedin, interviewed Cheryl Mills, interviewed Secretary Clinton. He’s the guy who took the exoneration statement, changed, ‘grossly negligent’ to ‘extreme carelessness.’ Grossly negligence is a crime.”
“He changed it,” said Jordan. “He interviewed [Trump adviser Michael] Flynn. He ran the Russian investigation and they kicked him off for a few text messages because they’re anti-Trump? There has to be more to this story. And I’m convinced the dossier is the key to this.”
Later in the interview, Dobbs said, “Congressman, I am entirely sympathetic with your view on the special counsel, except for one thing. If we end up with twice what Mueller has created, the republic will be in serious threat, if it’s not already. Look at what we’ve got here, as you pointed out today. We have a president whose entire administration is being threatened by a politically corrupt special counsel and politically corrupt leadership of the FBI.”
Jordan said, “All billed on — all billed on this dossier. And remember what the dossier is about. It was about the FBI working with the Democrat National Committee and their campaign to go after the other party’s nominee and the other party’s campaign. That is not supposed to happen in this country, and I think it did and all the evidence is pointing in that direction.”
people need to be held to account who were involved in, making that all happen.”
On Dec. 23 it was reported that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe will resign in March or April 2018, which is when his full pension and benefits would kick in. McCabe’s wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, received a little more than $700,000 in payments from two Democratic PACs in 2015, one headed by Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe. (Jill McCabe, a left-wing Democrat, ran for a state senate seat that year.)
In early 2016, Andrew McCabe helped to oversee the Hillary Clinton email investigation, a scandal for which she was exonerated by then-FBI Director James Comey in July 2016. (McCabe did not recuse himself from the Clinton case until one week before the 2016 presidential election.)
Andrew McCabe is also the FBI official whose emails show that the Hillary Clinton email investiagtion was designated “special” by the bureau and, contrary to procedure, a “decision was made to investigate it at HQ with a small team.”
Concerning Andrew McCabe’s decision to retire, President Trump tweeted on Dec. 23, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”
