After spending years instigating and advancing the debunked conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok is once again pushing the same, garbage narrative.
In a tweet referencing a Truth Social post by Trump, in which the former president announced that the FBI took several of his passports during the bureau’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, Strzok baselessly claimed that one of the documents is a “Russian passport” that is “kept in a vault at Yasenevo and only swapped out at third country meets.”
“Please oh please keep asking how you can turn down the temperature in the country,” the tweet reads. “And why does he have two passports?”
The post attacking Trump came the same day Strzok appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to defend the FBI’s raid of the former president’s estate, with Strzok attempting to claim the agency applies the law “objectively” to both sides of the political aisle.
“It’s not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other,” Strzok said. “What you see is the FBI going out on a day-in and day-out basis objectively investigating allegations of law.”
As outlandish as his “Russian passport” claims may seem, peddling Trump-Russia conspiracy theories is nothing new for the former FBI agent. In addition to being a notable figure in the Hillary Clinton email probe, Strzok, along with his former mistress and fellow agent Lisa Page, was notorious for playing an incredibly biased role in the FBI’s investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election.
In publicly revealed text messages between Strzok and Page, the two agents repeatedly exchanged feelings of harsh animosity towards Trump.
“Omg [Trump’s] an idiot,” a message sent on March 3, 2016, said.
“Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his Presidency would be,” said another, dated July 21, 2016.
The more alarming of the messages, however, came the following month when the two agents discussed the use of an “insurance policy,” were Trump to be elected that November.
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!,” Page said on Aug. 8, to which Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in [Andrew McCabe’s] office-that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected-but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok emphasized in a text dated Aug. 15. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40…”
An inspector general report released in 2018 criticized Strzok for, as The Federalist reported at the time, his “biased handling of the Hillary Clinton email and Russia collusion investigations” and “for using personal tech devices to handle FBI business,” with the report highlighting the institutional “damage” Strzok and his counterparts caused as a result of their openly biased conduct.
“[T]he damage caused by [Strzok and his colleagues’] actions extends far beyond the scope of the Midyear investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI’s reputation for neutral factfinding and political independence,” the report said. “At a minimum, we found that the employees’ use of FBI systems and devices to send the identified messages demonstrated extremely poor judgment and a gross lack of professionalism.”