Former FBI agent calls Trump ‘clear and present danger’ to US

Bloomberg

Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who started the 2016 probe into Russian election interference, says President
Donald Trump remains a “clear and present danger” to US national security after being compromised by personal and financial dealings with Russia.
In a new book, “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J Trump,” Strzok says that senior FBI officials were reluctant to open an investigation into Trump. They ultimately determined in May 2017 that they had no choice due to Trump’s actions, which included firing FBI Director James Comey and lying in ways that made him vulnerable to foreign coercion.
Trump and his supporters have portrayed Strzok as a “deep state” player in a plot to spy on him and his campaign. The president has derided Strzok in tweets as “the FBI lover” because of anti-Trump text messages Strzok exchanged with an agency lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair. The texts led to his firing.
But Strzok offers a forceful defense of the investigation, which is now the subject of a criminal probe ordered by Attorney General William Barr. What happened to Trump and his campaign “must never happen again,” attorney general said. “Even before he became president, Trump said and did things that gave the Russian intelligence services the means by which to coerce him — either subtly or explicitly — into taking actions that would benefit their country rather than his,” Strzok writes in the book, which chronicles his 22-year career as a counterintelligence agent and will be released on September 8.
“I also believed, based on all that we had already uncovered, that Trump was compromised — badly and in a myriad of ways,” Strzok says. “Today, moreover, I don’t feel that I have the option of keeping quiet about the clear and present danger that I know the Trump administration poses to our national security.”
Strzok was fired in August 2018 after the Justice Department’s inspector general said his texts created the appearance that investigative decisions were affected by bias, and referred him for potential disciplinary action. Strzok maintains his firing and the release of his texts was illegal and politically motivated, and he’s suing the Justice Department.
Strzok disputes that the Russia investigation was influenced by anti-Trump bias, saying it was opened in July 2016 solely to probe four individuals associated with Trump’s presidential campaign. The four were Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, who was later convicted and sent to prison; Michael Flynn, who would become Trump’s first national security adviser and whose guilty plea for lying to Strzok and another FBI agent is still in dispute; and campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. FBI officials took pains to keep the probe secret before the election, Strzok says.
“Contrary to cynical counternarratives, we weren’t a secret cabal of deep-state agents conspiring against Trump. Just the opposite,” Strzok writes. “The primary purpose of our efforts to keep the knowledge of our investigations limited was to prevent them from becoming public, which, if it had happened, would have done great damage to Trump, his campaign, his future administration, and many people surrounding him.”
An independent review by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded in December that the FBI followed appropriate rules and that there was
no political bias when the bureau opened the investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane.