Yesterday Trump was asked about the poisoning of Alexei navalny, the Russian opposition leader and once again he punted:
He simply cannot do it. No matter what. And we still don’t know why.
Peter Strzok’s new book about the investigation speaks to that apparently:
Mr. Strzok’s new book, “Compromised,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, provides a detailed account of navigating the two politically toxic investigations and a forceful apologia of the bureau’s acts. Mr. Strzok also reveals details about the F.B.I.’s internal debate over investigating the president himself, writing that the question arose early in the Trump presidency and suggesting that agents were eyeing others around Mr. Trump. Mr. Strzok was himself at first opposed to investigating the president.
[…]
Mr. Strzok’s insider look serves as a counter to the efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to discredit the Russia investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr has appointed a veteran prosecutor to review the conduct of the F.B.I., Mr. Strzok and others for possible misconduct and bias.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found the bureau had sufficient reason to open the inquiry and found no evidence of political bias. He said in a report that he found no evidence that Mr. Strzok’s political views affected the F.B.I.’s work but that he was “deeply troubled” by the texts.
Mr. Trump and his supporters seized on the texts when they were first disclosed in late 2017 as evidence of a plot to destroy his campaign and presidency.
“The reporting about my texts hadn’t only whipped Trump into a frenzy,” Mr. Strzok writes. “It had also sent Republicans in Congress into a righteous peeve, giving them fodder for right-wing indignation that would eventually ferment into the deep-state fairy tale that would consume conservative media.”
[…]
In his book, Mr. Strzok repeatedly rejects accusations that he was part of an effort at the F.B.I. to hurt Mr. Trump. He lays out the reasoning for opening the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into whether any Trump campaign associates had conspired with Russia’s interference operations in the 2016 election. The F.B.I. was “investigating a credible allegation of foreign intelligence activity to see where it led,” Mr. Strzok writes. “It started with Russia, and it was always about Russia.”
He also points out that the F.B.I. had kept the investigation as quiet as possible to keep from harming Mr. Trump’s candidacy, limiting the number of people inside the bureau who were aware of it to try to ensure its existence did not leak to the news media.
That’s important, particularly in light of this:
Mr. Strzok also devotes considerable time in the book to the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, known inside the bureau as Midyear Exam. He concedes that Mr. Comey erred by holding a news conference in July 2016 to say that the F.B.I. would not recommend Mrs. Clinton be charged with mishandling classified information but that her conduct was “extremely careless.”
Critics of Mr. Comey called the remarks an ad hominem attack that damaged her campaign. Mr. Comey’s speech, along with a pair of letters to Congress just before the election revealing that the investigation was briefly reopened and then closed, most likely cost her the election, Mr. Strzok says.
“And as much as it pains me to admit, the Russians weren’t the only ones who pushed the needle toward Trump,” he writes. “The bureau did too.”
Mr. Strzok says he was proud of the investigation, which he says was handled professionally, but he laments that the resources devoted to it could have been used to fight greater threats like China or Russia.
He says there was no comparison between the Russia investigation and the email inquiry, which the Republicans had used as an anvil to damage Mrs. Clinton’s election chances.
“Midyear was a mishandling case with little if any impact on national security,” Mr. Strzok writes. “In contrast, Crossfire was looking into whether anyone in the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Russians — even up to the unlikely worst-case scenario that Trump was a Manchurian candidate.”
This is the fundamental argument against this ridiculous crusade to persuade the American people that the FBI’s investigation into Trump was politically motivated. They kept it a secret at the same time that Trump’s opponent was being openly investigated for an alleged national security threat and publicly flayed on a daily basis.
It’s obvious that the FBI had good reason to wonder about all those Russians and people affiliated with Russia crawling all over the Trump campaign. And nothing Trump has done in this term has allayed any suspicions that something is very, very weird with his relationship with that country.
And by the way:
Nobody ever looked at the money.