MSNBC legal analyst and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann said Monday on “Deadline” that he believed he was targeted by former President Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department while he was in office.
The panel was discussing reports that then chief of staff Gen. John Kelly told a staffer that Trump wanted to use the IRS to target two FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Weissmann said, “There are sort of two ways in which there are improper uses of the Justice Department. There is the one that you talked about, which is this idea of siccing the IRS on political enemies, which is also a criminal offense, if can be proved. The other thing that was in the notes that John Kelly had was this idea of pulling security clearances. This is something that got a lot of attention in the middle of 2018. John Brennan was the victim of that. There was discussion of many other people, including Lisa Page and Pete Strzok and many others.”
He continued, “That just stuck me as incredibly close to home because while I was serving on Director Mueller’s team, and it was in the middle of August, the exact time that the news was breaking, I was subjected to a really unusual re-up of my clearance.”
Weissmann added, “The way clearances work is they last for five years. At the end of five years, usually six or seven, when the FBI gets around to it, there’s a re-up of your security clearance. Well, in the middle of the Mueller investigation, only two to three years into my clearance — and it’s way before it was up — I was subjected to a re-examination by the FBI, which I remember at the time being incredibly suspicious. So when I saw mikes reporting and those contemporaneous notes seemed pretty clear how to connect those dots in terms of why I was subjected to that.”
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