“It seems to me you’d be concerned if there was something there, not if there’s nothing there,” said Peter Schweizer, Breitbart News’s Senior editor-at-large, referencing FBI official Peter Strzok’s expressed concern that no evidence existed corroborating narratives related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ostensible investigation into Russian political interference.
Schweizer, the bestselling author of Clinton Cash and president of the Government Accountability Institute, made this comment during an interview Tuesday on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
“Here’s what’s interesting,” said Schweizer. “So [Peter Strzok is] texting to his girlfriend that there’s nothing there, and even says that he’s concerned that there’s nothing there, which strikes me as kind of an odd statement. Maybe you can’t read too much into it, but it seems to me you’d be concerned if there was something there, not if there’s nothing there.”
Strzok sent the following text to FBI colleague and romantic partner Lisa Page on May 19, 2017, two days after Mueller’s appointment as special counsel and weeks before he joined the Mueller-run probe: “You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern that there’s no big there there.”
“Were these guys actually trying to proactively damage an elected president that they knew, based on these texts, was apparently not guilty of the collusion that everybody thought that he might be?” asked Schweizer.
Prior to his dismissal from the Mueller-led operation following revelations of his hostility towards President Donald Trump, Strzok worked as one of its top agents.
The revelation of Strzok’s above-mentioned text initially came from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Tuesday interview with The Jay Weber Show.
Schweizer wondered if Strzok’s text revealed an abuse of state power in pursuit of partisan politics. “Is it just sort of chuckles, and they’re sitting around grousing about the new president, or are they actually using the machinery and the tools of power of government to try to undermine Trump? And that’s, I think, the next phase of this investigation. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it would not surprise me in the least that evidence is going to unfold that that’s precisely what certain people were trying to do.”
“These individuals did not like Trump, and they favored Hillary Clinton, and that’s fine; they’re entitled to their political opinions,” said Schweizer of Strzok and Page. “The problem is that the investigative process has been corrupted. Let’s remember, the FBI is a law enforcement agency. That’s it’s primary role, and law enforcement is all about procedures. You have certain procedures set up when you investigate because you have to stay within the guardrails of the law. But you also have those procedures because you want there to be a sense of justice. We follow the same procedure whether we’re investigating the janitor or the CEO.”
The FBI’s reputation had been damaged by its extension of “favorable treatment” to Hillary Clinton in its ostensible investigation into the former secretary of state’s negligent handling of classified information, said Schweizer. “What we’ve seen with this investigation is that there was massive favorable treatment for Hillary Clinton. They did not put her under oath. They basically decided at the beginning that she was not going to be charged with anything. Loretta Lynch, now, we understand, apparently knew that very early on, as well. So the best case scenario is the FBI walks away from this with a really serious black eye, where people walk and say that this revered agency, that along with the U.S. military is one of the few federal government institutions we still have trust in, has had its reputation damaged.”
Texts between Strzok and Page suggested bad faith investigatory pursuits of the president’s utilizing FBI powers, said Pollak: “So just to summarize: they didn’t think there was Russian collusion, but they seem to have put a plan into place to undermine him anyway, and that’s what we are seeing from the text messages we have access to.”
Drawing on reports related to a recently composed classified memo by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Schweizer suggested that the Obama administration’s surveillance of people affiliated with Donald Trump was entirely predicated on the “Steele dossier.”
“This memo basically lays out the case for why they decided to wiretap people next to President Trump during the 2016 campaign through the FISA court, and what the document, essentially distilled down, says is they did based on the Steele dossier,” said Schweizer. “The bottom line is, they decided to wiretap senior government officials on an unsourced anonymous dossier that nobody can independently confirm, and that is extremely dangerous.”
The FBI claims to have failed to preserve about 50,000 workplace text messages sent between Strzok and Page across a five-month time frame, incidentally ending on the day Mueller was appointed:
What a weird coincidence! “Misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades” destroyed the Strzok-Page text messages during a period that ended on May 17, the very day Mueller started. How bizarre is that? It’s almost as if it was planned that way.
— Mike (@Doranimated) January 21, 2018
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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