The Biden Justice Department moved to block a subpoena to depose former President Donald Trump sent by Peter Strzok, who sued the FBI for wrongful termination from his role as special agent after the emergence of his anti-Trump texts.
The DOJ recommended that the court “quash the subpoena” calling Trump to testify, as his effect on Strzok’s firing was not demonstrated by the lawsuit’s evidence as it presently stands.
“Such depositions cannot proceed unless the party seeking the testimony can make the weighty showing that the sitting or former official possesses directly relevant information that cannot be obtained from other sources,” read the filing, which was submitted Friday to the Southern District of New York for the case pending in Washington, D.C., district court.
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Trump played a role in his firing by “directly and indirectly [pressuring] FBI Director Wray and then-Attorney General Sessions to fire Special Agent Strzok when his text messages critical of the President were first disclosed,” Strzok’s lawsuit claimed.
The DOJ may allow the subpoena to proceed in the future if FBI Director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions were to reveal in their testimonies that they were “directly influenced” by the former president. Trump’s deposition was the first Strzok’s lawsuit requested.
The Justice Department pointed out that future discovery in Strzok’s lawsuit “may reveal, for example, that even if the officials directly responsible for Mr. Strzok’s firing were aware of communications from then-President Trump, they were not influenced by those communications” and argued that “it is too soon to assess whether deposition testimony from the former President is truly needed.”
The Justice Department said 14,000 pages of discovery had been provided to Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who also sued the bureau, so far.
The lawsuits from Strzok and Page are being handled jointly by the Justice Department.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the civil cases, ruled in November that all fact discovery in the lawsuits must be done by March 1 and all expert discovery by April 15, with another joint status report and a status conference later in April.
Strzok filed a civil lawsuit against then-Attorney General William Barr, the FBI, and Wray in August 2019, claiming he was wrongfully terminated in 2018 after the discovery of anti-Trump texts with Page, with whom he was romantically involved. He played a key role in opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in 2016 and interviewed retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in January 2017.
Strzok, a key figure in both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation, also alleged his constitutional rights were violated and is seeking reinstatement at and back pay from the bureau. He claimed in his lawsuit that his firing is “the result of unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies in Congress and the media” and condemned what he called the “deliberate and unlawful disclosure to the media” of his texts.
Trump celebrated Strzok’s firing in August 2018.
“Just fired Agent Strzok, formerly of the FBI, was in charge of the Crooked Hillary Clinton sham investigation,” Trump tweeted at the time. “It was a total fraud on the American public and should be properly redone!”
Strzok came under heavy criticism after the revelation of thousands of highly political anti-Trump texts he’d exchanged with Page throughout 2016 and 2017.
Page filed her own lawsuit against the DOJ and the FBI in December 2019, claiming that “what they did in leaking my messages to the press was not only wrong, it was illegal.”
The text messages between Page and Strzok revealed that the two officials were hiding their affair from their respective spouses. The texts also revealed that each official was critical of Trump while investigating him.
In one notable exchange in August 2016, Page asked Strzok, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
“No. No he won’t,” Strzok replied. “We’ll stop it.”
The Trump Justice Department revealed in November 2019 that Strzok’s wife seemed to discover his affair with Page on his phone in 2017. The Justice Department was pushing back on Strzok’s lawsuit and argued that Strzok betrayed the trust placed in him as a leader at the FBI as he helped lead high-profile investigations.
Strzok’s affair with Page was cited by the DOJ in a lengthy letter sent by the FBI’s Candice Will, the assistant director at the Office of Professional Responsibility, to Strzok in August 2018. Will recommended that Strzok be demoted and suspended for 60 days without pay, but FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich overruled her, and the FBI fired Strzok the next day.
Will harshly criticized the hundreds of Strzok-Page texts showing political bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton.
“The lapses in judgment embodied in those messages and others like them risked undermining public confidence in two of the Bureau’s highest-profile investigations,” the DOJ told the court in 2019. “And even more broadly, those lapses in judgment risked damaging the public trust in the FBI as a nonpartisan, even-handed, and effective law enforcement institution.”
The DOJ said those texts “cast a pall over the FBI’s Clinton email and Russia investigations and the work of the special counsel.” Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in 2017 after the texts were disclosed. Will noted “security violations” stemming from Strzok and Page using personal devices to conduct FBI business, which Will noted was “replete with irony given the FBI’s criticism of Clinton for having done so.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz suggested Strzok’s work could have been biased. When the bureau unearthed tens of thousands of Clinton emails in late September 2016 on the laptop belonging to Abedin’s husband, disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, Strzok, and other FBI leaders dragged their feet on investigating for weeks.
“We did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias,” Horowitz said.
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Mueller concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between Russia and Trump’s campaign. But the investigative conclusions were not without critics, with Horowitz saying the Justice Department’s report contained “significant errors and omissions” and that the bureau was overly reliant on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited and Democrat-funded dossier.
John Durham’s special counsel investigation into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia inquiry remains in progress.
