Bradley P. Moss is a partner at the Washington, D.C. Law Office of Mark S. Zaid, P.C., where he has represented countless individuals (including whistleblowers) serving within the intelligence community, and is also the deputy executive director of the James Madison Project, through which he has represented media outlets such as Politico, Gawker, Daily Caller, and the Daily Beast in FOIA lawsuits against the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.

What are we to make of the revelation that a senior FBI counterintelligence official, Peter Strzok, was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team this summer, allegedly for sending anti-Trump text messages during the 2016 campaign?

Media accounts are depicting Strzok as sort of the Forrest Gump of the FBI, playing a major role in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email habits, the opening of the FBI’s Russia probe and even the interview that ensnared former national security adviser Michael Flynn.


For President Donald Trump, his media allies and political operatives on the right, Strzok looks like the smoking gun that could discredit the “Russia hoax” by proving, once and for all, that a secret cabal of pro-Clinton civil servants has been squirreling itself away inside the federal government for years, just waiting for the chance to save her from criminal prosecution. Even Hugh Hewitt, a smart conservative radio host and law professor, is now calling for a second special counsel to conduct an investigation into the Justice Department and FBI to uncover this grand conspiracy of civil servants with personal political views.

So what should a fair-minded person, someone with no particular ax to grind, make of this Strzok business?

To be clear and unequivocal, his actions—if accurate as reported—should absolutely be reviewed to ensure he did not permit his apparent personal political views to influence how he conducted himself in both the investigation into Clinton’s private email server and the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. Of course, that review is already being conducted by DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General, the office that is routinely tasked with conducting these same types of reviews all the time to ensure impartiality by civil servants in the course of their official duties. Why is the OIG incapable of handling that review right now, just as it would on any other given day? No one seems to know for sure.

If all Strzok did, however, was privately express his personal political views, and he otherwise properly conducted himself in the context of his official duties, has he done anything wrong? The short answer is no. Not only are civil servants permitted to retain their personal political views while employed by the U.S. government, but they are even permitted by law to express those personal political views. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, governs concerns about politics permeating the civil servant workplace. The statute only prohibits civil servants from engaging in political activity, which is directed at the promotion of or advocacy against a political party, group or candidate. Strzok allegedly sent text messages to a colleague mocking Trump when he was still a candidate, something comparable with what countless of millions of Americans—including, no doubt, many GOP members of Congress—did with respect to both major candidates throughout the 2016 election. Unless Strzok was actually urging his colleague, “we must defeat Trump, vote for Hillary” or something along those lines, his commentary—while unwise—was still permitted under federal law. The fact that he was making those remarks at all is why Mueller removed him from the Russian collusion investigation out of an abundance of caution. That should strengthen our confidence in his investigation, not undermine it.

So what about Strzok’s involvement in the two investigations, and his specific actions that are now being called into question? Let’s review what he did.

According to the Daily Caller, it was Strzok who conducted the interviews of Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, two of Clinton’s most senior aides, in the presence of at least one (if not multiple) DOJ lawyers. Both Abedin and Mills denied having known that Clinton was running her own private email server. Those answers appear to conflict with email correspondence showing that both individuals were, in fact, aware of the existence of a server. What that correspondence does not reveal is that either of them actually knew it was a private server that their boss was privately running through a firm in Colorado. No amount of political reconstruction can render it otherwise, and former FBI Director James Comey himself stated during later congressional testimony that the discrepancies were not sufficient to warrant criminal prosecution. (“Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral,” Comey said at the time.)

It was Strzok, according to CNN, who allegedly modified the description in Comey’s July 2016 findings about Clinton’s actions from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” Although an earlier draft by Comey had described Clinton’s conduct as “grossly negligent,” using that verbiage would have been problematic at the conclusion of the inquiry, at which point Comey had concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case given the entirety of the facts. The phrase “grossly negligent” appears in one of the applicable criminal provisions; it would have been odd to keep that phrase if the determination was that criminal prosecution was unwarranted. Plus, are we really to believe that Comey himself didn’t sign off on that change? So why does it matter who made the suggestion, which was entirely appropriate?

It was also Strzok, who was the bureau’s No. 2 counterintelligence official until his apparent exile to the HR department, who authorized the initiation of the counterintelligence inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Given that Strzok is a recognized senior counterintelligence expert at the FBI, with particular expertise involving—wait for it—Russia, not only was this decision understandable but in fact appears to be exactly what he is supposed to be doing.

That brings us to Flynn’s fateful interview. Clearly here we have evidence of the grand Deep State conspiracy, right? The double standard? Nope. Not only was Strzok not the primary person conducting the interview, and not only was he not the only one in the room, but Flynn has admitted to knowingly providing the FBI with false material information. That’s what the plea deal is. The White House has even gone so far as to acknowledge that Flynn was lying to the vice president about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, which is why Trump claims to have fired him. In what world is the big scandal that a team Strzok oversaw caught someone lying who admits he was lying, and even the White House concedes was lying?

The bottom line: Civil servants are permitted by law to have personal political opinions, and, with due respect, the calls by Hewitt and others for a special counsel appear detached from reality. Let the inspector general do his job—and cool it with the witch-burnings.