By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 24, 2018
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
Two top FBI officials under fire for exchanging anti-Trump text messages during the 2016 election spoke of a “secret society” the day after President Trump's victory, according to two lawmakers with knowledge of the messages. Peter Strzok -- a top counterintelligence official involved in both the Hillary Clinton email probe and FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe -- exchanged more than 50,000 messages with senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was romantically involved. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, said Monday that among the messages the pair exchanged are references to a “secret society” within the Department of Justice and the FBI. “We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of [Trump’s] election, that there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI -- to include Page and Strzok -- that would be working against him,” Ratcliffe said Monday on Fox News' “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
“I’m not saying that actually happened, but when folks speak in those terms, they need to come forward to explain the context with which they used those terms,” he added. Gowdy said the “secret society” reference occurred the day after Trump won the presidential election in November 2016. “There’s a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these two supposed to be objective fact-centric FBI agents, saying that perhaps this is the first meeting of the ‘secret society,'” Gowdy said. “So of course I’m going to want to know what secret society you’re talking about because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the Electoral College; so yeah I’m going to want to know," he said.There is more than a little reason to believe this thinking extended beyond Strzok and Page. During the text exchange when Strzok talked about an "insurance policy" against Trump winning, he referenced a conversation that had apparently taken place in the office of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe is close to FBI Director Christopher Wray, who reportedly told Attorney General Jeff Sessions he would resign if Trump or Sessions fired McCabe. And if Strzok thought that starting a "secret society" was feasible, he must have had some idea who'd be willing to join it. He also must have had some sense that trying to organize one within the culture of the FBI was possible without him risking his job. Remember, at this point Trump had just been elected and James Comey was still the FBI director. Was there good reason for Strzok to believe he could attempt to organize such a thing without fearing reprisals from Comey or McCabe? Was the good reason that he knew the higher-ups at the FBI shared his disdain for Trump and would be willing to let the FBI be used as a political weapon against the commander in chief?
View Comments
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.