Fired FBI official Peter Strzok will release a book, seemingly timed to coincide with the final weeks of the fall election, alleging that President Trump has fallen “under the sway” of Russia.
The disgraced intelligence operative’s book “” will hit shelves Sept. 8.
Book publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said Tuesday that Strzok, forced out of the FBI in August 2018, “had seen more than enough to convince him that the commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin.”
The “a devastating account of foreign influence at the highest levels of our government.”
“Russia has long regarded the United States as its ‘Main Enemy,’ and I spent decades trying to protect our country from their efforts to weaken and undermine us,” Strzok said in a statement.
“In this book, I use that background to explain how 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, and how the national security implications of Putin’s triumph will persist through our next election and beyond.”
Strzok opened the FBI investigation of Russian election interference in July 2016. Special counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from the probe in 2017 after discovery of anti-Trump text messages swapped on work cellphones with the agent’s mistress and then-FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Mueller’s investigation ultimately found no evidence that Trump’s campaign “colluded” with Russia to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump and his allies say Strzok exemplifies bias in the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Strzok played a key role in the case against Trump’s first White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, which the Justice Department is now seeking to drop, f🌠inding it had an unfounded investigatory basis.
The anti-Trump investigator invoked the never-used Logan Act of 1799 to keep alive an investigation of Flynn that the FBI had planned to close. Strzok interviewed Flynn days into Trump’s presidency about his post-election communications with Russia’s ambassador, without explicitly telling him it was part of an investigation, and without any lawyers representing Flynn present.
Flynn pleaded guilty in late 2017 to lying to Strzok, but laterꦐ sought to withdraw his plea, saying he did not intentionally lie.