One of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags is getting ready to hit back. Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who has been cast by the president as an agent of the deep state who sought to undermine him during the Russia investigation, will argue in a book this fall that Trump is “under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin”—Vladimir Putin. “The elevation by President Trump and his collaborators of Trump’s own personal interests over the interests of the country allowed Putin to succeed beyond Stalin’s wildest dreams,” Strzok said in a statement announcing Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump, due out in September. “The national security implications of Putin’s triumph will persist through our next election and beyond.”
Strzok, whose texts with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page made him a frequent target of Trump’s Twitter attacks and right-wing conspiracy theories about the so-called FBI “witch hunt” against the president and his allies, played a key role in the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s role in Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. Trump and William Barr have been working to rewrite the history of that probe since last year, when the attorney general misrepresented Robert Mueller’s report and cleared the president of wrongdoing. Barr’s Justice Department this year dropped the case against Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to Mueller in 2017, and Trump this month commuted the sentence of longtime friend Roger Stone. The latter drew a rare rebuke from the tight-lipped Mueller, who defended the Stone prosecution and the Russia probe as a whole. “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes,” the former special counsel wrote in the Washington Post. “He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.” But Trump and Barr have persisted, with the latter on Tuesday decrying the “grave abuses involved in the bogus” investigation in a Capitol Hill testimony.
Strzok’s forthcoming book—and those of Norman Eisen, special counsel to the Judiciary Committee during Trump’s eventual impeachment last winter, and Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann—seems an attempt to reclaim the history of the special counsel’s probe from the president and his allies. Whether they’ll be able to do so remains to be seen. Past books about the president, including by former FBI director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, made big waves in the Washington media and irked Trump, but didn’t exact lasting damage on the president.
Part of the issue may be that so much is already known about the Russia probe and opinions on it are already hardened. Even if Mueller didn’t ultimately establish that Trump had conspired with the Russians in 2016, we know for sure he is open to soliciting foreign election interference and to covering it up because he tried to do the same thing this cycle with Ukraine; he was impeached over the matter, but not convicted, reaffirming for him that Republicans will stand by him, regardless of his conduct.
The insider accounts from Strzok, Weissmann, and Eisen, whose book dropped Tuesday, may serve as a reminder of Trump’s shady activities on the world stage—and, perhaps, a warning about the funny business he may be preparing to engage in this November. But it’s hard to imagine the books changing anyone’s minds about the Russia probe before the election. With Barr expected to milk his investigations into the investigators for “October surprises” to damage Democrats this fall, though, it’s possible the books can provide a useful counternarrative to the Trump administration’s political attacks.
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