A federal judge ruled that Strzok hadn’t produced sufficient evidence for his First and Fifth Amendment challenges to his 2018 firing.
A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a constitutional challenge brought by former FBI agent Peter Strzok related to his 2018 termination after a trove of politically biased comments about individuals he was investigating came to light.
While the full ruling is under seal, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia publicly released a summary of her ruling, in which she dismissed Strzok’s claims that his First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated by the termination.
“The Court … finds that [Strzok’s] interest in expressing his opinions about political candidates on his FBI phone at that time was outweighed by the FBI’s interest in avoiding the appearance of bias in its ongoing investigations of those very people,” Jackson wrote.
In 2018, an internal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Robert Mueller found that Strzok, then serving as deputy director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, had sent thousands of politically biased messages on his FBI cellphone related to cases which he was leading.
That included both the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s transmission of classified information on a private email server, and the investigation into alleged collusion between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Mueller, leading a probe into the allegations of Russian collusion, discovered 10,000 messages exchanged in 2016 and 2017 between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom Strzok was then having an affair.
In the texts, both officials expressed a strong animus against Trump and a preference for Clinton, the Democratic candidate in the 2016 election.
The two used words like “idiot,” ’’loathsome,” ’’menace,” and “disaster” to describe Trump.
In an August 2016 exchange, Page asked Strzok, “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok replied.
Following the discovery of the trove of messages, Strzok was removed from both cases and all operational duties with the bureau pending further investigation.
According to the judge’s summary of the case, internal opinion on how to sanction Strzok was divided.
A representative of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility believed that Strzok should face a 60-day suspension and demotion. However, then-FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich disagreed and ultimately decided that Strzok should be terminated.
Strzok filed a lawsuit challenging his termination in August 2019.
In the lawsuit, Strzok alleged that “the FBI fired [him] because of his protected political speech in violation of his rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” over the private text messages with Page.
Strzok also argued that the decision by Bowdich deprived him of his contractual interest in continued employment by the bureau, in violation of his rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
By Joseph Lord
