(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The FBI will pay disgraced former FBI official Peter Strzok and his former lover Lisa Page millions in a settlement over the release of their anti-Trump text messages, CNN reported on Friday.
Strzok will receive $1.2 million, while Page will get $800,000 after the bureau released email exchanges that exposed their anti-Trump bias during the 2016 presidential campaign. Such bias ultimately ignited the now-defunct Russian collusion hoax probe.
The infamous messages between Page and Strzok, both married at the time, showed them discussing ways to “stop” Trump, whom they labeled an “idiot.” The two also backed Hillary Clinton, the twice-failed presidential candidate, in text messages.
👀 Former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attorneys say he’s getting $1.2 million from a settlement with DOJ over the release of his private text messages. Additional claims about his removal from the FBI remain pending. pic.twitter.com/MRvAtlmiUZ
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 26, 2024
The disturbing display of bias fueled concerns about political bias and discriminatory behavior against Trump, reaching a climax after FBI agents aggressively raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.
The messages were first released by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to counter selective leaks undermining public trust in the DOJ. Fast forward to 2024, the settlement stipulates that the release of the messages violated the Privacy Act.
Despite his own bias, Strzok claimed that the FBI released his text messages for political purposes.
“While I have been vindicated by this result, my fervent hope remains that our institutions of justice will never again play politics with the lives of their employees,” he claimed, ignoring the bias he exhibited during the Mueller investigation.
Special Counsel John Durham, appointed in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, revealed that Strzok opened the investigation into allegations of Russian collusion despite his “hostile feelings toward Trump.”
Moreover, Durham’s report highlighted that the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, was initiated without interviewing those who provided the initial information or assessing internal FBI intelligence.
“Had it done so,” Durman noted, the FBI would have learned there was no evidence to back the Steele Dossier’s allegations.
“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign,” Durham wrote in its final report.
