September 8, 2020
Peter Strzok— the FBI counterintelligence agent whose spiteful texts about President Donald Trump took him down; along with girlfriend and FBI lawyer Lisa Page; and arguably, the Russia investigation, itself—says in a new book that, even if Trump didn’t formally conspire with the Russian election interference operation, the president was badly compromised.
In the new release, entitled Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Strzok states that Trump was exposed because of his questionable business dealings, the hush money paid on his behalf to silence women, shady transactions at his charity—and, most importantly, “his lies about his Russia dealings,” including his secret 2015 effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow even as he told the world that he had no business with Russia.
“This simple fact could explain something that made no sense otherwise: why Trump repeatedly … [chose] the course of action that made little sense in the context of U.S. national security but that clearly benefited Russia,” he writes.
And while—according to NBC News, which has obtained a copy of the book—Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia, the author’s inside 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.
“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. “
In a statement to NBC News, White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern called Strzok’s account “utter nonsense” and argued that neither Mueller nor Congress “…[has] found any wrongdoing by the president.” He added: “Strzok is a joke, and his book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. ”
Research contact: @NBCNews