Beleaguered FBI agent Peter Strzok may not comply with a Congressional subpoena issued Tuesday to testify in public at a joint hearing slated for 10 a.m. on July 10.
Speaking with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Tuesday, Strzok’s attorney Aitan Goelman said “My client will testify soon, somewhere, sometime. We just got this subpoena today, so I don’t know whether or not we are going to be testifying next Tuesday in front of these two particular House subcommittees.”
When asked by Cuomo why the answer wasn’t an “automatic yes,” Goelman replied “Because we have come to the conclusion, forced to come to the conclusion, that this is not a search for truth, it is a chance for Republican members of the House to preen and posture before their most radical, conspiracy-minded constituents.”
To be clear, Peter Strzok’s attorney just suggested that members of Congress who suspect that his client’s well-documented hatred of Donald Trump affected the Trump investigation he spearheaded are “radical” and “conspiracy-minded.”
“From our experience with the committee thus far, it is obvious that they don’t want the truth. They don’t want to hear what Pete has to say,” added Goelman.
Actually, we suspect they do – as evidenced by the subpoena for open testimony from “Pete.”
As we reported on Tuesday, Strzok testified last Wednesday in a closed door session a week after declaring he would do so “without immunity” and without invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself during questioning over his anti-Trump / pro-Clinton bias while heading up investigations into both candidates.
On Monday, Goelman said in a letter to the committee that they have “sharpened their knives behind closed doors” and will spring a trap on Strzok by seizing “on any tiny inconsistencies” with last week’s testimony “to ‘prove’ that he perjured himself or made false statements,” Goelman wrote in the letter somehow obtained by CNN
“Having sharpened their knives behind closed doors, the Committee would now like to drag back Special Agent Strzok and have him testify in public — a request that we originally made and the Committee denied”
Sounding suspiciously like Rudy Giuliani, he continued: “What’s being asked of Special Agent Strzok is to participate in what anyone can recognize as a trap.”
In his email, Goelman wrote that it was “generous to characterize many of these inquiries as ‘questions’” — suggesting instead that the GOP’s closed-door queries had been “political theater and attempts to embarrass the witness” through various leaks.
Among the questions Goelman complained Republicans put to Strzok were one about whether he loved Lisa Page, the recipient of his anti-Trump texts with whom he was having an affair, and another asking “what DO Trump supporters SMELL like, Agent?” — a reference to an August 2016 text Strzok sent in which he told Page he could “SMELL the Trump support” at a Walmart in southern Virginia. –WaPo
Gunpowder and freedom?
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