Peter Strzok Loses Court Case Over His Firing From the FBI

As you may remember, Peter Strzok was part of the Mueller investigation until texts between himself and fellow agent Lisa Page were released. Those texts indicated a clear dislike for President Trump that preexisted his involvement in the investigation.

Mr. Strzok was reassigned this summer from Mr. Mueller’s investigation to the F.B.I.’s human resources department, where he has been stationed since. The people briefed on the case said the transfer followed the discovery of text messages in which Mr. Strzok and a colleague reacted to news events, like presidential debates, in ways that could appear critical of Mr. Trump.

“Immediately upon learning of the allegations, the special counsel’s office removed Peter Strzok from the investigation,” said a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, Peter Carr.

At the time this was reported in Dec. 2017, we didn’t know what the text messages said. But once the texts came out, Strzok was fired by the FBI.

The FBI has fired Peter Strzok, an agent who was removed from the Russia probe last year for sending text messages disparaging President Donald Trump, Strzok’s lawyer said Monday…

Page wrote in a text, Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” to which Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

And of course we all remember the text about the Russia investigation being an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election. In any case, both Strzok and Page sued over the release of their text messages and last year they reached a settlement with the DOJ.

Two former FBI officials settled lawsuits with the Justice Department on Friday, resolving claims that their privacy rights were violated when the department leaked to the news media text messages that they had sent one another that disparaged former President Donald Trump.

Peter Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent who played a crucial role in the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016, settled his case for $1.2 million. Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who exchanged text messages with Strzok, also reached a separate settlement. Court records reviewed by The Associated Press show she is to be paid $800,000.

The two had sued the Justice Department over a 2017 episode in which officials shared copies with reporters of text messages that they had sent each other, including ones that described Trump as an “idiot” and a ”loathsome human” and that called the prospect of a Trump victory “terrifying.”

But even with that case resolved, Strzok still had a separate case going over his firing from the FBI. Today, a judge ruled against him in that case.

Strzok argued in the lawsuit that his FBI bosses had retaliated against him in order to placate Trump, who was outraged over texts that Strzok exchanged while investigating ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that, after several years gathering evidence and testimony from those involved in the 2018 decision to terminate the veteran counterintelligence agent, Strzok’s lawyers had failed to show that his dismissal violated his First Amendment rights.

Jackson, an Obama appointee, stressed that she was not ruling on whether Strzok’s firing “was the appropriate sanction” for his conduct, only that the voluminous evidence assembled over years of litigation — including a deposition of Trump himself — had not proven Strzok’s rights were violated.

Strzok could still appeal this ruling but so far his attorney hasn’t said whether or not he intends to do that.

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