A 2016 text message between two FBI officials who worked on both the Clinton email investigation and the Russia inquiry says that President Obama “wants to know everything we are doing.”
It’s not clear from the September 2, 2016 text message between then-Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page whether it was a general comment about Mr. Obama’s oversight of the FBI or a description of his interest in a particular matter.
And it doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Obama was up to no good. The FBI and the rest of the Justice Department work for the President, although this fact can be easy to forget while consuming much of contemporary media coverage. But hands-on management by Mr. Obama could explain a lot about both the Clinton email investigation and the Obama administration’s electronic surveillance of a Trump associate.
Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page were conducting an extramarital affair, which created a dangerous vulnerability to blackmail given that they worked on counterintelligence matters. So they were not exactly model employees. Further, their texts showing extreme bias against the President and his voters are part of a highly disturbing record of electronic communications. When presented with content from their text messages, Special Counsel Robert Mueller dismissed Mr. Strzok from his team conducting the Russia probe.
Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and his colleagues on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had to learn about the texts in a news account and have lately been prying them out of Justice.
This week Mr. Johnson’s majority staff has released a new tranche of text messages and reports on what they’ve found:
Although sometimes cryptic and disjointed due to their nature, these text messages raise several questions about the FBI and its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. Strzok and Page discussed serving to “protect the country from the menace” of Trump “enablers,” and the possibility of an “insurance policy” against the “risk” of a Trump presidency. The two discussed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch knowing that Secretary Clinton would not face charges—before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before her announcement that she would accept Director Comey’s prosecution decision. They wrote about drafting talking points for then-Director Comey because President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” Strzok and Page also exchanged views about the investigation on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign—calling it “unfinished business” and “an investigation leading to impeachment,” drawing parallels to Watergate, and expressing Strzok’s “gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”
It is the entrance of President Obama into the Strzok-Page drama that raises the most interesting questions. Both the decision to abandon the normal Justice process to exonerate Hillary Clinton and the decision to seek warrants to surveil the political opposition certainly don’t look like calls that get made by middle management. Of course many Americans would hope that such decisions are never made at all. But given their extremely unusual character they would almost certainly require sign-off from a very senior official.
Again, there is very little context for the comment about President Obama wanting to “know everything” about the FBI. But it does perhaps suggest an answer as to why, for example, former FBI Director James Comey would assume a power he did not hold in deciding that Justice prosecutors would not charge Mrs. Clinton for her mishandling of classified information.
When explaining all the perfectly good reasons for firing Mr. Comey last May, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote about this incident and about Mr. Comey’s bizarre public statements regarding Mrs. Clinton’s conduct:
In response to skeptical questions at a congressional hearing, the Director defended his remarks by saying that his “goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think about it.” But the goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference. The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the Attorney General to make a prosecutorial decision, and then – if prosecution is warranted – let the judge and jury determine the facts.
