Judge tosses Strzok lawsuit over FBI firing, Trump texts

Story highlights

· Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok’s lawsuit over firing dismissed

· Judge says FBI’s interest outweighed Strzok’s free speech claim

· Strzok alleged he was fired due to Trump’s political pressure

· Texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page criticized Trump during 2016 race

A federal judge has thrown out a former FBI agent’s claims that he was illegally fired after sending disparaging text messages to a colleague about President Donald Trump.

Peter Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent who played a crucial role in the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016, alleged in a federal lawsuit that the FBI caved to “unrelenting pressure” from Trump when it fired him and that he was unfairly punished for expressing his political opinions.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Sept. 23 rejected Strzok’s claim that his August 2018 firing violated his First Amendment free speech rights. The judge concluded that the FBI’s interest in avoiding the appearance of bias in an ongoing investigation outweighed Strzok’s interest in expressing his opinions about political candidates on his FBI phone.

Jackson also said Strzok didn’t present any evidence that the FBI treated him more harshly than they would have treated somebody in similar circumstances because Trump was the subject of his critical text messages.

“Each of the FBI officials deposed maintained that given plaintiff’s rank and his role in the two investigations, and the appearance of bias that permeated the messages, the situation was unprecedented, and there were no comparators,” she wrote.

The Justice Department had sought to block the suit by asking a judge to rule in the government’s favor without a trial, saying in a court filing last year that Strzok was fired based “solely on his misconduct and its impact on the FBI.”

Strzok, who helped lead FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in 2017 after texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page were discovered by the Justice Department’s office of inspector general.

Many of the texts the two sent, on FBI-issued cell phones, were bitingly critical of Trump as he ran for president in 2016 and included insults like “idiot” and “loathsome human.”