The Heart Of Putin-Gate-- Russian Financial Leverage Over Trump-- Was Shut Down By Rod Rosenstein And Never Investigated

Peter Strzok, who led the FBI’s Russia investigation, was a long-time Trump target and, because he was an FBI agent, was unable to respond to Trump or the Trump goons who attacked him mercilessly. The day after tomorrow his book, Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump will be released... and he has a lot of responses to Señor Trumpanzee and his goon squad.

Ironically, Strzok didn't look at Trump's campaign as criminal as much as compromised. His initial goal was to find out who in the Trump campaign was working with the Russians to undermine the Clinton campaign. As the investigation got underway, top candidates were various combinations of Paul Manafort, Carter Page George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn. And if that set of names doesn't spell criminal, you shouldn't be in law enforcement.

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In the book, Strzok wrote that he "hadn’t wanted to investigate the president of the United States" but after Trump was elected the evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia was so massive that it was difficult to avoid not investigating him. With the approval of Andrew McCabe, the FBI's deputy director, Strzok opened a counterintelligence case against Trump, sealing his own fate (and that of McCabe's and much of the FBI leadership's).

Strzok felt then-- and still feels now-- that deep, hidden Russian financial leverage over Trump-- which Rod Rosenstein never allowed Mueller's team to wade into-- was the key to the whole case. Eventually Mueller took over the investigation and Strzok and his team came under his aegis.

AP's Eric Tucker reported that "Trump’s attacks have continued even as two inspector general reports found no evidence Strzok’s work in the investigations were tainted by political bias and multiple probes have affirmed the Russia probe’s validity... 'I deeply regret casually commenting about the things I observed in the headlines and behind the scenes, and I regret how effectively my words were weaponized to harm the Bureau and buttress absurd conspiracy theories about our vital work,' Strzok writes."

Strzok documents pivotal moments during the investigation, recounting for instance how then-national security adviser Michael Flynn “baldly lied” to him and another agent about his Russian contacts even though Flynn had not shown customary signs of deceit agents are trained to look for.

Though Trump supporters contend the interview was designed to get Flynn to lie, Strzok says the FBI actually gave him multiple prompts to refresh his memory. While Attorney General William Barr has said the interview was done without a legitimate purpose, Strzok says it was necessary to better understand the Trump orbit’s ties to Russia and Flynn’s own “hidden negotiation with a foreign power that had just attacked our elections.”

Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Barr’s request to dismiss the case is pending.

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Writing for Politico yesterday, Natasha Bertrand, who has read an advance copy of Strzok's book, reported that "After nearly two years, Mueller released his final report in April 2019. It outlined the Trump’s campaign’s extensive contacts with Kremlin-linked actors before, during, and after the election, and led to dozens of indictments and multiple guilty pleas and convictions, including of Manafort. But the report showed no signs of a holistic examination of Trump’s decades in the business world, including his company’s myriad real estate transactions with several Russians suspected of ties to organized crime and the many opaque deals, masked through shell companies, that helped Trump’s companies stay afloat throughout the years. 'I personally don't see how they could have done [the counterintelligence investigation] because I don't know how you do that without getting tax records, financial records, and doing things that would become public,' Strzok said of Mueller’s team. 'Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.'"

I sincerely doubt that a Biden Justice Department will consider reopening the case for more than 10 seconds-- even though American democracy absolutely requires it.