Patience is wearing thin on the Durham investigation. Outgoing Attorney General William Barr recently appointed John Durham as a special counsel to ensure his probe into the origins of the Russian collusion hoax continues into the next administration. Durham was tapped in April of 2019 to investigate the origins of the collusion delusion that engulfed the nation for years, with Barr launching the investigation after not being satisfied over the explanations for some of the actions that were taken in this circus act. Barr also noted that for all intents and purposes, President Trump and his campaign were spied on by the Department of Justice. Now, as collusion hysteria dies down due to the results of the 2020 election, new texts from disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok shows that the DOJ was investigating Trump before the counterintelligence probe was officially launched against his campaign team. There are two different timelines here. The dates are off (via The Federalist):
The timeline here suggests the FBI was not honest when it claimed anti-Trump investigations began on July 31, and only because of alleged information about George Papadopoulos. Strzok’s July 28 text to Page about ongoing anti-Trump probes shows otherwise. https://t.co/D6nLO7ZhZB
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 17, 2020
Newly declassified text messages from former FBI agent Peter Strzok suggest that the FBI began investigating then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign before the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened.
While the FBI claims that investigations into Trump’s campaign began with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, communications between Strzok and his alleged mistress, FBI special counsel Lisa Page, show that the agent asked Page to discuss “[o]ur open C[counter-]I[ntelligence] investigations relating to Trump’s Russian connections” with him on July 28, 2016.
Corporate media such as the New York Times suggested that there was no evidence that agents like Strzok were “eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign” and that it was former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’s comments that sparked the investigation.
Former FBI Director James Comey denied knowledge of any investigation until “sometime towards the end of September 2016.”
Previously declassified communications from Strzok, however, show the FBI employees’ strong dislike and criticism of Trump as a presidential candidate. In a string of 2016 messages, just weeks after the formal investigation was opened, Page asked Strzok, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” to which he replied: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
Strzok was rightfully fired for his anti-Trump texts. He exchanged tens of thousands of texts with Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Strzok tried to pass these embarrassing texts off as a sign of his patriotism. Page said that they meant exactly what they say. Page resigned from the FBI. James Comey and Andrew McCabe were fired from their positions as FBI director and deputy FBI director respectively. Will there be justice? Will these people, who are just the tip of the deep state operation against Trump face charges? We’ll see, but as of now, I wouldn’t bet on it. Things could change, however, and I’m still hoping enough will be there in the end to at least drag the individual responsible through the mud.
To refresh, before Strzok’s texts were revealed, which led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller removing him from the investigation, he was a top counterintelligence agent who launched the collusion probe into Trump’s team and was one of the key point persons in the analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email server. The reasoning behind the Crossfire Hurricane spy operation against the Trump campaign has been described as a “trainwreck” by Kevin Brock, a former FBI intelligence official, who reviewed Strzok’s paperwork for the operation.
In his op-ed in The Hill about these documents, Brock wrote, “What this FBI document clearly establishes is that Crossfire Hurricane was an illicit, made-up investigation lacking a shred of justifying predication, sprung from the mind of someone who despised Donald Trump, and then blessed by inexperienced leadership at the highest levels who harbored their own now well-established biases.”
Why did the FBI give us the wrong date for this supposed counterintelligence operation? I’m sure that’s one of many questions that the folks involved in this fiasco couldn’t really explain, hence the probe into its origins. On top of that, this leeches into the Mueller probe since it seems that chapter of this Trump-Russia collusion theater was set up to give the FBI and their operation a legitimacy polish since it was botched from the start.
