Peter Strzok alleges in new court filing the federal government violated his rights

Peter Strzok, the fired former FBI agent who played a senior role in the early Russian election meddling investigation, has alleged in a new court filing in a case challenging his ouster that the Justice Department and FBI violated his rights to privacy and free speech.

The document was filed in DC District Court Monday in response to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit Strzok filed in August, which alleges his termination in 2018 came because of political pressure from President Donald Trump.

In the new filing, Strzok’s legal team argues the Justice Department’s defense of his termination “would subject thousands of mid-level managers in the federal government to punishment for expressing their opinions about candidates for national office in private water cooler conversations.”

“There is no precedent supporting this terrifying argument,” Strzok argues.

In summer 2017, former special counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from his team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election after an internal investigation first revealed texts with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom Strzok had an extramarital relationship, that could be read as exhibiting political bias.

Lawmakers received several tranches of recovered messages between Strzok and Page in 2018, including several messages referring to Trump.

Page wrote in one text during the summer before the 2016 presidential election, Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” to which Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Strzok told Congress last July that his text was “off the cuff” and based on his belief that voters would not support Trump after his behavior as a candidate.

Monday’s filing challenges the Justice Department’s argument that Strzok and Page shouldn’t have expected privacy because they communicated on their FBI-issued phones.

“First, nearly every aspect of a modern workplace, and for that matter nearly every non-workplace aspect of employees’ lives, can be monitored,” Strzok says. “The fact that a workplace conversation can be discovered does not render it unprotected.”

The document further alleges that the agencies unlawfully provided Strzok’s messages with Page to the media and thus their burden to argue the messages were disruptive “should be even heavier for the government to carry.”

“(I)t was the DOJ itself that first leaked and later officially publicized Strzok’s speech by giving a selected subset of his texts to the media,” the document says. “Defendants should not be heard to complain about the notoriety and putative damage to the FBI’s reputation from Strzok’s speech when it was their own illegal disclosures, magnified and distorted by the false attacks made by the President and his allies, that placed a spotlight on Strzok’s opinions.”

Page similarly alleged that the Justice Department and FBI unlawfully provided her text messages with Strzok to the media in a lawsuit filed earlier this month.