Even FBI’s Peter Strzok Suspected CIA of Lying Leaks to Media

May 6, 2019 (EIRNS)—Former FBI agent Peter Strzok suspected that the CIA was behind inaccurate leaks to the media about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, Chuck Ross reports in today’s Daily Caller. On April 13, 2017, Strzok emailed some colleagues,

“I’m beginning to think the agency [the CIA] got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn’t shared it completely with us. Might explain all these weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some of the leaks.”

That Strzok email was highlighted in a letter Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (IA) and Ron Johnson (WI) sent today to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael K. Atkinson, asking the IG if he had investigated whether John Brennan’s CIA and/or other intelligence community agencies had leaked information to the press. The senators pointed to a Dec. 15, 2016, message that Strzok had sent to then-FBI attorney Lisa Page: “Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad....” Earlier in the day, NBC News had broken a big story alleging that the Russian President was personally involved in the election hacks—a story sourced to “senior U.S. intelligence officials,” the Daily Caller reports.

A few months later, Strzok emailed colleagues about a 2017 story in the British daily, Guardian, which claimed that British intelligence had provided their U.S. counterparts with information about possible Russian contacts with the Trump campaign in late 2015. This report raised Strzok’s suspicions that the CIA had intelligence it had not shared with the FBI.

Ross reports that Senators Grassley and Johnson wrote to Intelligence IG Atkinson, “These texts and emails raise a number of serious questions and concerns,” and asked him to provide more information about the intelligence “sisters,” and why they would have started leaking. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s IG Michael Horowitz is investigating the FBI and the Justice Department’s handling of the Russia probe. Peter Strzok was the lead case agent on both the Clinton and Russiagate investigations and, with Page, was part of Mueller’s initial prosecutorial team. Horowitz’s earlier investigation showed that they considered their Russia work as an FBI “insurance policy” against Trump. The Daily Caller quotes Attorney General William Barr’s May 1 statement that the DOJ has “multiple” criminal leak investigations underway, and that Barr has also formed a task force to investigate the origins of the Trump investigation.