House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte subpoenaed FBI agent Peter Strzok Friday — days after an attorney for the embattled investigator said he would testify voluntarily before Congress.
The disgraced FBI agent’s deposition will take place on June 27th at 10:00 a.m. EST.
Aitan Goelman, Peter Strzok’s attorney, told the Washington Post last week that his client will appear voluntarily before the House Judiciary Committee or any other Congressional Committee— without immunity or invoking his Fifth Amendment rights.
The Justice Department watchdog report released last week concluded Strzok had shown “bias,” during the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email use.
Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in the summer of 2017 after the department discovered anti-Trump text messages he exchanged with FBI lawyer Lisa Page during the 2016 presidential election. Strzok’s mistress, Page, only briefly worked on Mueller’s team and left before the texts were discovered.
Texts between the two included their observations about the 2016 election and criticism of Trump. They used words like “idiot,” “loathsome,” “menace,” and “disaster” to describe him. In one text four days before the election, Page told Strzok that the “American presidential election, and thus, the state of the world, actually hangs in the balance.”
Many of the texts had already been made public after the FBI sent them to Congress. But in a new, inflammatory text revealed in the report, Page wrote Strzok in August 2016: “(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
Strzok responded: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
The inspector general’s report said that exchange “is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
The Associated Press Contributed to this report.
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