(By way of disclosure, Strzok and I have previously only met once in passing, though we do share the same literary agent.) He certainly is no Hillary Clinton superfan, as he finds himself repeatedly stymied by her team’s stonewalling of the email investigation. He comes across in the book as driven, aggressive, respectful, patriotic, and deeply bound to the principles and procedures of the FBI. And part of what’s so surprising about Strzok’s unique and engaging book-part memoir, part lesson in intelligence tradecraft, and part cri de couer-is just how utterly typical an FBI agent he appears to be.įar from a conniving villain or Deep State plant, Strzok-who by the summer of 2018 was the deputy assistant director of the bureau’s counterintelligence division, the number two job in one of the FBI’s most important missions-was widely regarded in the bureau as one of the most promising counterintelligence agents of his generation.
I’ve spent a dozen years covering the FBI, written multiple books about the bureau and dozens of magazine articles, interviewed hundreds of its employees-from evidence technicians and analysts to six of its eight directors-and probably spoken to FBI personnel more days than not since 2008. After spending two years as a punch line and exclamation point, Strzok appears in Compromised for the first time as a fully formed human being. Meanwhile, most Americans have never known anything more in-depth about Strzok than those texts.
“Fraud” is hardly even the worst thing Trump has called the former agent Strzok’s partial list of presidential insults on page 303 fills nearly half the page: “incompetent,” “corrupt," “horrible,” “hate-filled” “totally biased,” “low,” “terrible,” “disgusting,” “stupid” “bad person,” “sick sick” person,” “con artist,” “evil person,” and much more. Investigators also uncovered and publicized Strzok’s affair with fellow FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Strzok became the most famous FBI agent in the world after his private, candid political comments and fears about Donald Trump were spread-cynically and wrongly-by Rod Rosenstein’s Justice Department as part of the inspector general’s review of the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. That approach seems fitting, since the reason Strzok wrote a book at all is that he was caught up in a unique 21st-century scandal, a surreal intersection of texts, tweets, Donald Trump, and Russia. Trump relies instead on some very famous criticism: Trump calling Strzok a “fraud.” The back cover of Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. In his new book out today, former FBI agent Peter Strzok eschewed the traditional complimentary blurbs from famous friends for a different tack.
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