‘Who’s Putting These Ideas in His Head?’

Applebaum: For example?

Strzok: Like, for example, why did he not take stronger action against the Russians for placing bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan? Why has he, for no apparent reason, moved 11,000 American troops out of Germany? Or here’s an obscure one: Why did he parrot Russian propaganda and call Montenegro a “very aggressive” nation when that country had just joined NATO? Everybody knows damn well that Donald Trump couldn’t find Montenegro on a map. Who’s putting these ideas in his head?

Applebaum: Or why doesn’t he speak out against the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, or why hasn’t he spoken up for the democracy movement in Belarus? Do you think that there are other ways in which Trump is beholden to foreign powers?

Strzok: It seems clear to me from public reporting that there are more.

Applebaum: And why haven’t they been investigated or even addressed by any official sources? The FBI? The Department of Justice? Congress?

Strzok: I don’t want to comment specifically on any of them. There are always a variety of reasons why you don’t disclose something: because it’s classified, because it’s the subject of an ongoing investigation, or even because it was investigated and found to be without merit. Or perhaps because it should have been pursued and was not, because of improper political influence.

Applebaum: The issue in your book that bothered me the most was the imbalance of resources and attention in 2016 to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump, and the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email. In your book, you make a striking observation: “If Clinton’s email had been housed on a State Department system, it would have been less secure and probably much more vulnerable to hacking than it was on her private server.” Yet you also say that the case involved dozens of talented people who could have been working on other, more important cases—like, for example, the investigation into the Trump campaign. It looks to me like the FBI gave this case such a high priority because of pressure from Congress.

Strzok: Once we opened that investigation, which I think was a defendable decision, it was incumbent on us to do a thorough job. That’s true of every investigation. But in this case, we were looking at the presumptive Democratic nominee for the president of the United States, and we all knew this was going to be unpacked and disassembled, looked at up and down and back and forth.

Applebaum: Exactly. You spent months focused on a secondary problem with no real national-security implications, because you knew that there would be scrutiny from the Republican media and the Republican Congress.

Strzok: I don’t think we had any other choice, and I don’t know that I would agree that this changed the way we did the investigation. There was absolutely, I think, a sense of frustration, as I write in the book, that we had this magnificent team, yet we were, at the end of the day, conducting a glorified email-mishandling case. But that didn’t change our behavior.