FBI agent Peter Strzok referred to President Donald Trump as an “idiot” in a series of texts exchanged with then-fellow special counsel investigator Lisa Page during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I just saw my first Bernie Sander[s] bumper sticker. Made me want to key the car,” Page, now a senior FBI lawyer, wrote in a message to Strzok, released by the Department of Justic Tuesday night.
“He’s an idiot like Trump. Figure they cancel each other out,” Strzok replied.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein released 375 of Strzok’s Trump-related text messages to the House Intelligence Committee. The communications span over a year, from Aug. 16, 2015, to Dec. 1, 2016. Rosenstein is scheduled to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday
Strzok, who was dismissed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in the early summer after DOJ officials learned he sent messages to a colleague mocking Trump, also referred to the president as a “loathsome human” and said, “God, Hillary [Clinton] should win 100,000,000 – 0,” in a string of March 2016 texts text messages obtained by USA Today.
Page’s detail on Mueller’s team concluded before the text messages were unearthed during an Office of the Inspector General inquiry into political bias on the special counsel.
The pair also disparaged House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Page said she hoped Ryan “fails and crashes in a blaze of glory,” to which Strzok responded, “[the GOP] needs to pull their head out of that a–. Shows no sign of occurring any time soon.”
Strzok, who also helped lead the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, softened former FBI Director James Comey’s description of her behavior from “grossly negligent”—a term that carries legal weight—to “extremely careless.”
Fox News reported in early December that the wife of a Department of Justice attorney was once employed by Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier, which amounted to a compilation of unverified salacious claims about Trump’s ties to Russia.
The report led Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, to call for a special counsel to examine bias among Mueller’s investigators. Additionally, conservatives have demanded a special prosecutor to examine Comey’s decision to forego pursuing criminal charges against Clinton.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who ordered federal prosecutors to look into Republican lawmakers’ calls for a special counsel, said Strzok’s anti-Trump communications “would raise serious questions of public trust” if proven to be true in a Dec. 2 statement.
“We will ensure that anyone who works on any investigation in the Department of Justice does so objectively and free from bias or favoritism,” Sessions said.
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