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Longtime FBI agent Peter Strzok II, who until recently served as deputy assistant director of the agency's Counterintelligence Division, gained public notoriety when he was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation for sending private text messages critical of the president. Formerly the lead FBI investigator into Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state, Strzok has since come under investigation himself by the Justice Department's inspector general, been grilled on his ethical integrity by the House Oversight Committee, and stands accused by conspiracy theorists of being a linchpin in a deep state plot to sabotage Trump's presidency. A July 2018 salvo from the far-right blog Big League Politics attempted to make the case that Strzok, who spent part of his childhood in Iran, is a covert CIA operative who served the Iranian regime's interests while allegedly acting as a key Middle Eastern Intel operative for President Obama, then was placed in the FBI to ensure a win for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. That salvo was a mishmash of accusations derived in part from the supposed insider testimony of an anonymous former co-worker of Strzok's, in part from misreadings of public documents (including decades-old press clippings about Strzok's father), and in part from a labored effort to connect dots that simply aren't there. The post began as follows: We interrupt here to point out that the author of the post appears to have misstated several details: Peter Strzok wasn't born in the late 1960s; he was born on 7 March 1970 (according to a birth announcement in the Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan Evening News). His father is Peter Strzok Sr., not Peter Strzok II (Strzok Sr.'s father's name was Michael, not Peter). Peter Strzok II is FBI agent Peter Strzok. Unless the latter fathered a namesake, there is no Peter Strzok III. The claim that Strzok grew up in Iran is an overstatement. The Strzoks moved there while Strzok Sr. was serving in the Army Corps of Engineers, from which he retired in July 1978. While we don't know precisely how long the family resided there, the Eau Claire, Wisconsin Leader-Telegram reported in 1979 that the Strzoks left Iran at the beginning of that year to return to the U.S. because of the political unrest that followed the overthrow of the Shah. Peter was eight years old at the time. The same article said that Strzok Sr. was then considering taking a job in Saudi Arabia. It's unclear whether he did or not. If the Strzok family did move to Saudi Arabia, it was for a very short period of time, given that Strzok Sr. accepted a job with the international aid organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in 1980 and relocated his family to Upper Volta (a country in Africa now known as Burkina Faso). The Strzoks would be there for three years. As for his schooling, the younger Strzok attended the American School in Tehran (where his mother also taught), as claimed. We've not been able to confirm that he attended school in Saudi Arabia. Once back in the United States, Strzok didn't supposedly attend St. John's Preparatory School (as the Big League Politics blogger put it) — he did, in fact, attend that school (which is in St. Cloud, Minnesota, not Minneapolis) from 1983 through 1987, and his graduation notice appeared in the St. Cloud Times on 15 May 1987. He later earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Georgetown University (as noted on an alumni donor list published on the school's web site). An outsized portion of the Big League Politics post was devoted to Strzok's father's life, as if to posit that father and son have been operating some sort of deep state conspiratorial family business for the past 40 years. The author went to great lengths to impute insidious motives to Strzok Sr.'s overseas humanitarian projects, which — far from being something he dabbled in (as the post describes it) — to all appearances became his life's work after he retired from military service. Strzok Sr. served as the director of Catholic Relief Services in Upper Volta for three years. There is no evidence that he helped dismantle and reassemble that country, which underwent a military coup while he was there. Strzok ran a food assistance and nutrition education program that served some 150,000 children and mothers. Nor, contrary to another claim in the post, was he still present in Upper Volta when its name was changed to Burkina Faso in 1984 (not 1985, as claimed). In mid-1983 Strzok accepted the post of CRS director in Haiti. We know he was there for less than two years, because a New York Times report published in August 1985 names former employee Peter Strzok as one of three complainants in a dispute over Catholic Relief Services' alleged mishandling of funds. His time in Haiti coincided with the final few years of the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who would be overthrown in 1986. Our blogger took a special interest in the fact that Strzok Sr. lived and worked in a succession of international hot spots, repeatedly insinuating that he must have been engaged in espionage or other clandestine activities. Looks like whenever there is a regime change in modern history a Strzok is lying in the shadows waiting, the post said. But ironically, far from lying in the shadows, the only reason we know as much as we do about Peter Strzok Sr.'s whereabouts over the past 40 years is that he spoke so freely and openly about his activities in the press. We can't prove he wasn't a covert operative, of course, but neither has anyone else demonstrated that he was. One of the oddest claims in the post was that Strzok Sr. was involved in the Iran-Contra affair (involving the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua), which took place during the mid-1980s under President Reagan. We were unable to find evidence that Strzok played any role at all in Iran-Contra, or was mentioned in the news coverage or congressional hearings that followed the scandal. The coverage that does exist about Strzok from that time indicates that he was actively engaged in doing humanitarian aid work in West Africa. There was also an attempt to link Strzok Sr. up with the Clintons: Never mind that the Clinton Foundation wasn't launched until 1997, more than a decade after Strzok left CRS and founded his own non-government agency, AFGRO (Agency to Facilitate the Growth of Rural Organizations). Whatever overlap there may be, or have been — if any — between the Clinton Foundation and Catholic Relief Services, no such thing could have existed when Strzok was involved with the latter organization. The purpose of asserting these nonexistent connections was to create the appearance of a continuum of father-son involvement with Iran, Haiti, and the Clintons: Once again, we have searched for any scrap of documentation that might prove that Peter Strzok II (the FBI agent) served as the key Middle Eastern intel operative in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran during the Obama administration, and we found none. As an FBI counterintelligence officer, there is no reason why the younger Strzok would or could have played such a role anyway. Big League Politics had a ready explanation for this, though, namely that Strzok was actually working for the CIA: In addition to citing the anonymous informant as the source of this claim, the post linked out to an article referencing an unclassified document that supposedly proved Strzok worked for the CIA and the FBI at the same time: Which is utter nonsense. Although the specified document did list Strzok's title as section chief of the Counterespionage Section, it's patently untrue that section chief isn't an FBI post. Both agencies have sections and chiefs (and assistant section chiefs). Not only was section chief precisely the position Strzok held before being promoted to deputy assistant director at the FBI, but others have held that title, too. The claim that Strzok was placed in the FBI to ensure a win for Hillary Clinton is flatly absurd. Strzok joined the agency in 1996. Was the plot to ensure a Hillary Clinton win in 2016 already in motion 20 years beforehand? The Big League Politics post was a clumsy, error-ridden effort to generate a deep state conspiracy theory around FBI agent Peter Strzok, who, up until the text message incident that derailed him in 2017, seems to have trodden a fairly straightforward career path in the agency over a period of more than two decades. Peter Strzok spent several years of his childhood in Iran, but he did not grow up there. There is no evidence nor any good reason to suppose that he acted as an envoy or intel operative in U.S. dealings with Iran at any time during the Obama administration. And the claim that Strzok is or was a covert CIA operative placed in the FBI to help Hillary Clinton win the presidency and subvert the Trump administration is a flight of fancy divorced from all evidence and logic.
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