“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Peter Strzok, the FBI’s lead agent on the Russia investigation, replied in one of many above the law–attitude texts to fellow FBI agent Lisa Page, who had texted him, “Trump’s not ever going to become President, right? Right?!” How could an FBI agent lawfully stop the election of a presidential candidate?
Why did Andrew McCabe write a memorandum of a meeting where Rosenstein suggested—in front of Strzok and Page whom he supervised—secretly wearing a wire to the Oval Office to prove that Trump was mentally “incapacitated” and therefore possibly subject for removal from office under the 25th Amendment? Why was a Special Counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election instead of a regular Department of Justice attorney? Why choose Mueller, described by the Washington Post in 2017 as “Brothers in Arms” with Comey, whom Trump had just fired? Why did Rosenstein not recuse himself from the investigation, given that he wrote the memo that Trump cited as providing the grounds for firing Comey?
Why didn’t Mueller properly vet the investigators joining the Special Counsel team? Not only did it include Strzok, but Andrew Weissmann who was apparently partisan—he had reportedly attended Hillary’s 2016 election night party and had praised Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s defiance of Trump’s court-approved “travel ban” on Muslim countries—and had a reputation as a prosecutor willing to give faulty jury instructions to score a win. (Weissmann’s conviction of the auditing firm Arthur Andersen was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a stunning 9–0 decision.)
Why did Mueller allow the Independent Counsel’s office to investigate for another 22 months after Strzok conceded to Page, via text in May 2017, “You and I both know the odds are nothing.… there’s no big there there.” (As the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, Strzok knew very well that Trump hadn’t colluded with the Russians.)
