The smoking gun text message was dated August 15, 2016, with Strzok telling Page, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office, that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It is like an insurance policy in the likely event you die before you’re 40.” Page does not appear to have responded. But the reference to “Andy” is to then associate deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, a controversial figure in the FBI investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server.
What Strzok’s message makes clear is that Page and Strzok, in the presence of a high-ranking FBI official, had laid out an “insurance policy” plan to make sure Trump never served his term as president, even if Trump pulled off a miracle to win the election and beat Strzok and Page’s clear favorite, Hillary Clinton. Soon it developed that the “insurance policy” involved the Russian collusion evidence the FBI had been quietly accumulating against the Trump campaign. The frightening prospect conveyed by Strzok’s text message was that a small group of politically biased FBI officials at the very top of the organization were determined to both make sure Hillary was never indicted or prosecuted and make sure sufficient evidence to impeach Trump was available in the unlikely event that he should be elected president.
Put simply, Strzok’s text message from August 15, 2016, would be Exhibit 1 should Strzok, Page, and McCabe ever be indicted for treason for plotting a coup d’état against a legitimately elected president of the United States. What the text message also shows is that the Russian collusion theme was developed briefly during the campaign, but the narrative was not considered particularly important because Obama never made it an issue at that time. But after the election, the Russian collusion story came front and center, the core argument that would be developed in an effort to deny Trump the presidency. Had Hillary been elected president, the nation probably would never have heard anything more about the Russian collusion meme. Hillary did not lose the election because of Russian collusion; Hillary lost the election because she did not pay enough attention to counting Electoral College votes.
As the second-highest-ranking official in counterintelligence, Strzok helped lead the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s private email server and approved the bureau’s July 2016 investigation into Russian meddling.3 Electronic records show that Strzok changed a key phrase in the language FBI Director James Comey used on July 5, 2016, in a public statement designed to describe how former secretary of state Hillary Clinton handled classified information. Strzok was responsible for striking language that described Clinton’s actions as “grossly negligent”—clearly a crime under national security statutes—and altering it to “extremely careless,” a phrase designed to suggest that Clinton bore no criminal responsibility for her actions. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, reacted in anger, writing to the FBI, “Although Director Comey’s original version of his statement acknowledged that Secretary Clinton had violated the statute prohibiting gross negligence in the handling of classified information, he nonetheless exonerated her in that early, May 2nd draft statement anyway, arguing that this part of the statute should not be enforced.”4
Still, in his prepared remarks, Comey managed to fire a shot across Hillary’s bow, making it clear that Hillary’s handling of classified material had been dangerously close to the language the statute specified as criminal. By doing this, Comey demonstrated that the Deep State was still running the show, even though no one seriously believed Trump had a chance of winning.
In August 2017, when Special Counsel Mueller first learned of the text exchange between Strzok and Page, Strzok was ousted from Mueller’s team and reassigned to the FBI’s Human Relations Department. On August 16, 2017, ABC News reported that Strzok left Mueller’s team investigating Russian collusion, although Mueller continued the cover-up, refusing to explain even to Congress why Strzok was dismissed.5 A little more than a month later, ABC News reported on September 28, 2017, that Mueller’s team lost its second investigator, Lisa Page, who had been described as recently as June 2017 by Wired magazine as a veteran trial attorney—a key part of Mueller’s “investigatory dream team” who had “deep experience in money laundering and organized crime cases.”6 Again, Mueller refused to explain even to Congress why Lisa Page was fired.
The reason for Strzok’s and Page’s dismissal from Mueller’s special counsel team remained secret until December 2017, when the DOJ shared with Congress a sample of 375 text messages from the 10,000 messages Inspector General Horowitz found Strzok and Page had exchanged between August 2015 and December 2016. Both Special Counsel Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—the DOJ official, initially an Obama appointee, to whom Mueller reported after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself in the Russia collusion investigation—had covered up all information about the Strzok-Page text messages in order to hide from the public the amount of anti-Trump hatred there was at the head of the FBI and DOJ during the election and afterward, leading to Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller as special counsel. Once the American public learned the truth, the credibility of not only Mueller’s special counsel investigation but also the FBI and the DOJ was seriously tarnished.
Strzok’s involvement in the Clinton email investigation was extensive, with FBI records documenting that Strzok attended the FBI’s interview with Hillary Clinton on July 2, 2016, just days before then FBI director James Comey read a public statement announcing he was declining to recommend prosecution of Clinton in connection with her use, as secretary of state, of a private email server. The FBI interview with Clinton was taken without Clinton being placed under oath and without a verbatim transcript being made. Strzok appears to have been involved in a series of FBI decisions that granted immunity to key Clinton aides involved with the private email server controversy, including Clinton’s longtime legal confidant Cheryl Mills. In his counterintelligence position, Strzok also enjoyed liaison with various agencies in the intelligence community, including the CIA, then led by director John Brennan, a longtime supporter of and advisor to President Barack Obama.7
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
Campaign finance records show that a political action committee tied to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat political operative with financial ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, donated $467,500 to Jill McCabe in 2015 to assist her in her race for a Virginia state senate seat. Campaign finance records further reveal that the Virginia Democratic Party, over which Governor McAuliffe exerted considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 of support to McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers.
This adds up to $675,000 donated by McAuliffe and the Democratic Party in Virginia to McCabe’s wife while he was associate deputy director of the FBI and one of a small group at the head of the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign responsible for investigating Hillary’s email server. The 2015 Virginia state senate race was Jill McCabe’s first run for office, and her campaign spent $1.8 million in the losing effort.8 On October 23, 2016, McCabe wrote an email to the press indicating the Clinton email server investigation had assumed “special status” and was being moved to the control of a small group of high-ranking people at the FBI headquarters in Washington, which included McCabe.9 On January 29, 2016, FBI Director James Comey appointed McCabe as deputy director of the FBI.
When President Trump fired Director James Comey on May 9, 2017, McCabe, then the deputy director, became the acting director of the FBI. Among the issues DOJ Inspector General Horowitz is investigating is whether McCabe should have recused himself from participating in the FBI’s Russia investigation, given the conflicts of interest created by his wife’s funding from Terry McAuliffe and the Democratic Party in Virginia.10