As much as the U.S. mainstream
media has mocked the idea that an American “deep state” exists and that
it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between
senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI
lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government’s
intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United
States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as
unfit as Trump.
In one Aug. 6, 2016 text
exchange, Page told Strzok: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are
because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.” At the
end of that text, she sent Strzok a link to a David Brooks column in
The New York Times, which concludes with the clarion call: “There comes
a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re
not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are
mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.”
Apparently after reading that
stirring advice, Strzok replied, “And of course I’ll try and approach it
that way. I just know it will be tough at times. I can protect our
country at many levels, not sure if that helps.”
At a House Judiciary Committee
hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, criticized Strzok’s boast
that “I can protect our country at many levels.” Jordan said: “this guy
thought he was super-agent James Bond at the FBI [deciding] there’s no
way we can let the American people make Donald Trump the next
president.”
In the text messages, Strzok also
expressed visceral contempt for working-class Trump voters, for
instance, writing on Aug. 26, 2016, “Just went to a southern Virginia
Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support. … it’s scary real down here.”
Another text message suggested
that other senior government officials – alarmed at the possibility of a
Trump presidency – joined the discussion. In an apparent reference to
an August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok
wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016, “I want to believe the path you threw
out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets
elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”
Strzok added, “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.”
It’s unclear what strategy these
FBI officials were contemplating to ensure Trump’s defeat, but the
comments mesh with what an intelligence source told me after the 2016
election, that there was a plan among senior Obama administration
officials to use the allegations about Russian meddling to block Trump’s
momentum with the voters and — if elected — to persuade members of the
Electoral College to deny Trump a majority of votes and thus throw the
selection of a new president into the House of Representatives under the
rules of the Twelfth Amendment.
The scheme involved having some
Democratic electors vote for former Secretary of State Colin Powell
(which did happen), making him the third-place vote-getter in the
Electoral College and thus eligible for selection by the House. But the
plan fizzled when enough of Trump’s electors stayed loyal to their
candidate to officially make him President.
-- Robert Parry, "The foundering Russia-gate scandal" (CONSORTIUM NEWS).
