Trump’s latest Peter Strzok text message ‘BOMBSHELL’ is just as dubious as its predecessors

[Mr. Black]

Trump’s latest Peter Strzok text message ‘BOMBSHELL’ is just as dubious as
its predecessors

Yet again, President Trump and his supporters have found a Peter Strzok
text message of which they're quite fond. They previously highlighted
Strzok's “insurance policy” and “secret society” text messages, and now
they've uncovered a new alleged smoking gun: A Sept. 2, 2016, text in
which FBI agent Strzok says then-President Barack Obama “wants to know
everything we’re doing.”

The text was all over conservative media Wednesday and appeared to be the
impetus for the above tweet from Trump. The argument is that it may
constitute Obama meddling in the Clinton email investigation.

But as with its predecessors — both of which had very reasonable, non-
nefarious explanations — there are real reasons to be skeptical that this
new text is truly a “BOMBSHELL,” as Trump alleges.


The main reason to be skeptical is that we're not even sure what kind of
briefing Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page were texting about. Senate
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson
(R-Wis.), whose new report first highlighted the text Wednesday, strongly
hints that it might refer to the Clinton email investigation:

This text raises additional questions about the type and extent of
President Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and
the FBI investigation of it.

Johnson insists he's simply raising questions, but his juxtaposition of
the text and “questions about” Obama's “personal involvement in the
Clinton email scandal” is very suggestive. That framing has even led some
media outlets to flatly report that the text was about the Clinton probe.
But it's not at all clear that the briefing was about the Clinton probe,
much less that Obama was seeking to become “personally involved” in
whatever he was being briefed on.


Johnson's report argues in its footnotes that the text could well be about
the Clinton probe because Justice Department official Stephen E. Boyd had
told the committee that the DOJ would redact personal text messages and
text messages relating to other investigations. “Presumably, because this
message was not redacted, the Department believes it may relate to the
FBI’s investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s
private server,” the report says.

But this is also highly suggestive, and it fails to account for the fact
that there is one other major investigation that comes up regularly in the
texts and wasn't redacted: The Russia investigation.


Texts between Strzok and Page. Texts from Strzok are labeled “OUTBOX,”
while texts from Page are labeled “INBOX.”
Judd Legum makes the case that the briefing was indeed going to be about
the Russia probe rather than the Clinton one, and former Obama Justice
Department official Matthew Miller (who served earlier in the Obama
administration) went so far as to say it “has to be about the Russia
probe.” Legum points out that the text is from Sept. 2, which appears to
be during a months-long lull in any activity in the Clinton investigation.
It's long after July, when then-FBI Director James B. Comey announced he
wouldn't recommend criminal charges for Clinton. And it's also before
Sept. 28, which is when the same text messages show Strzok and Page
suggested they had just become aware of the new Clinton emails on Anthony
Weiner's laptop. (These were the ones Comey would later disclose on the
eve of the election, which was cast as a reopening of the Clinton
investigation.)


A Sept. 28 text from Strzok strongly suggests that the matter had been
dormant until they discovered the new emails:

Got called up to [then-FBI Deputy Director] Andy [McCabe]'s earlier .?.?.
hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny,
includes a ton of material from spouse. Sending team up tomorrow to
review... this will never end...

It's also worth noting that three days after the text message, on Sept. 5,
Obama confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin about Russian meddling
in the 2016 election. In other words, there was much more reason for Obama
to be briefed on that at the time than on the Clinton probe.


Update: Citing anonymous "associates of the FBI employees involved," the
Wall Street Journal is reporting the briefing was indeed about Russia, not
Clinton.

There is one plausible argument for believing the briefing may have been
about the Clinton investigation, and that's because Sept. 2 was the day
the FBI released a summary of that investigation. But again, this speaks
to the fact that the investigation was dormant at the time — so much so
that a conclusive summary was being produced.

And any briefing on the subject at the time, it stands to reason, would
have been about something that already happened rather than something in
which Obama could suddenly make himself “personally involved.”



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/02/07/trumps-latest-
peter-strzok-bombshell-is-just-as-dubious-as-its-predecessors/?
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