Photo: Peter Strzok and Robert Mueller
What're we supposed to think when it's revealed the man running the Hillary Clinton email server investigation (Peter Strzok) was a married Hillary supporter conducting an adulterous affair with a government lawyer, while dissing Donald Trump in his clandestine billet-doux text messages?
(Was he auditioning for Harvey
Weinstein's next movie, assuming Weinstein is ever allowed to make a movie
again or even would make one that in any way besmirched his good friend
Hillary?)
As an FBI agent, Strzok's use of
text messaging for such an enterprise was nothing short of moronic in this
digital age, but nevertheless he was not fired but simply and quietly sent to FBI "Siberia"
last summer, his activities only miraculously coming to public
attention last week.
Why the secrecy? Many reasons,
probably yet to be determined, but it comes down to this: the FBI, like the
Mafia, practices omertà.
They have a code of silence as Tom
Fitton of Judicial Watch, who spends his life trying to pry information from
our supposedly premier law enforcement agency, can tell you. Ditto, now,
the House Intelligence Committee, whose chairman Devin Nunes, as Byron York reports for the Washington
Examiner, is apoplectic.
Word of the messages and the affair
were news to Nunes, even though the committee had issued a subpoena that
covered information about Strzok's demotion more than three months ago.
The committee's broadly worded subpoena for information related to the
so-called Trump dossier went to the FBI and DOJ on Aug. 24. In follow-up
conversations on the scope of the subpoena, committee staff told the FBI and
DOJ that it included information on the circumstances of Strzok's reassignment.
On Oct. 11, Nunes met with deputy
attorney general Rod Rosenstein. In that meeting, Nunes specifically discussed
the committee's request for information about Strzok.
In an Oct. 31 committee staff
meeting with the FBI, bureau officials refused a request for information about
Strzok.
On Nov. 20, the committee again
requested an interview with Strzok. (Three days earlier, on November 17, Strzok
met with the Senate Intelligence Committee.)
On Nov. 29, Nunes again spoke to
Rosenstein, and again discussed Strzok.
On Dec. 1, the committee again
requested to speak with Strzok.
Obviously nothing has been
forthcoming until now. But speaking of FBI stonewalling, there's
this new revelation from Fitton,
concerning the "happenstance" meeting between Bill Clinton and then
AG Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix airport. The "accidental"
encounter supposedly resulted in some chit-chat about grandchildren, but
only a few days later then FBI director Comey announced he wouldn't recommend
prosecution of Hillary Clinton:
Because of the revelation in our
other lawsuit, the FBI – without our knowledge—"reopened" our [July
7, 2016] FOIA request. The agency supposedly found about 30 pages of
information, which it needed six weeks to review. The FBI finally gave them to
us late Thursday.
Now we know why the FBI played shell
games. The documents show that FBI
officials were concerned solely about the leaking of details of the tarmac
meeting. None of the documents show top agency officials cared one whit about
the propriety of the meeting itself, but only about who blew the whistle on the
covert tête-à-tête.
In one email, an FBI official writes
“we need to find that guy.” And in another we learn that the Phoenix FBI
office was contacted “in an attempt to stem any further damage.” An FBI
official working on Lynch’s security detail even goes so far as to suggest
non-disclosure agreements to keep the full facts from coming forth.
No wonder the
FBI didn’t turn these documents over until we caught it red-handed,
hiding and lying about them.
Simply put, the FBI appears to be
fully complicit in a cover-up that attempted to influence a presidential
election for a favored candidate – Hillary Clinton. And the truth was
trampled on a Phoenix tarmac.
Sense a pattern here, Watson?
The FBI seems suddenly concerned
with leakers when it affects them. Well,
that's only a part of the story -- but a significant part. Like most
bureaucratic organizations, whether in law enforcement or not, as they grow
self-preservation increasingly becomes the dominant motivation. In the
case of the FBI, it's self-preservation leavened with a significant dollop of
political bias, conscious and unconscious.
In the case of Strzok, the bias was
clearly a bit too conscious for his own good, but who could doubt, given the dramatis
personae of Mueller's investigation, that many of his cohorts share
the same views but have the horse sense to leave them out of their text
messages.? (Apropos Strzok, it's interesting he wasn't fired. Was it
because they feared he would go rogue?)
In a series of heavily criticized
tweets (aren't they always) Trump is asserting that the FBI's reputation is in tatters.
Of course, he's right. This isn't justice as it's supposed to
be, not even faintly. It's Kafka meets Orwell in the Deep State.
Robert Mueller may not realize it,
but the conclusion of his investigation, whatever it is, will never be accepted
by a huge percentage of the public. As the French say, Mentir est honteux.
Lying is shameful. Mike Flynn may have lied, but so,
undoubtedly, has the FBI, multiple times, more than Flynn could ever dream of
doing or be capable of doing. And they're the ones we're supposed to
trust in the end.
UPDATE: Apparently my attack
on the FBI was understated. Peter Strzok, it turns out, was the man who
was responsible for changing "grossly negligent" to "extremely
careless" in Comey's final report on the Clinton email investigation, thus
setting Hillary free for a crime the world knows she committed. How do I
know this is true? In this instance, consider the source.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated
screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.