The former FBI Chief of Counterespionage who headed the Hillary Clinton email probe says there is more than enough evidence to open an investigation to determine if Donald Trump may have committed a crime by taking classified materials from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and notes it’s important to be able to prove criminal intent, which in this case would be a “slam dunk.”
“I think DOJ has to be prudent” when it investigates a former president, says Peter Strzok (photo: left), who worked at the FBI for 22 years, “there’s a great deal of care that needs to be taken [to] make sure that there’s a legitimate predication,” he said, meaning a legitimate reason to open a case.
“But look, in my mind, this is clearly beyond that threshold,” he said, given the amount of evidence against the former president.
“If you look in the past, what the FBI investigated in terms of former CIA Director John Deutsch, in terms of former national security adviser Sandy Berger, General Petraeus, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there’s a clear path the DOJ takes when they investigate these things, and to say they want to be ‘apolitical’ in my mind, to hesitate to look at Trump isn’t apolitical it’s kind of the opposite of that.”
“This is Trump, who threw tantrums and threats and four years of behavior has caused people to back away from doing the very basic thing that the FBI should be doing. And that is, in my opinion in this face, a very clear set of facts that merit opening investigation to find out just what were the facts and circumstances surrounding this classified information that may have been found in his possession at Mar-a-Lago.”
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Strzok goes on to say “the hardest thing when you look at criminal mishandling of classified information, inevitably one of the hardest things to determine is the intent of what the person was when they did it, whether they knew it was wrong, but they were trying to do it in variance with the law.”
“And when it comes to classified information, I mean, take your pick of the dozens and dozens and dozens of campaign rallies, where he led chants of ‘lock her up’ specifically because he said Hillary Clinton had classified information on her server and in our last fight, he knows that’s wrong and she should go to jail. So there is no argument for any jury for DOJ to be able to come in and play videotape after videotape after videotape of former President Trump saying having unauthorized retention of classified information is against the law. It is a slam dunk argument when it comes to trying to establish what he knew was and wasn’t against the law.”