Peter Strzok claims new Trump charges highlight ‘the danger that he poses to national security’

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok claimed on Saturday that the new charges brought against former President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case highlight “the danger that he poses to national security.”

“This indictment just gets much worse for Trump,” Strzok said on MSNBC. “It highlights the danger that he poses to national security, and it really shows what he was doing to try and undermine the judicial process.”

The Justice Department (DOJ) filed a superseding indictment against the former president on Thursday, accusing him of attempting to delete surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago and adding another Espionage Act count over a military document that he boasted of having at a 2021 meeting.

Strzok pointed to the document, which was marked as top secret and not releasable to foreign nationals, in arguing that the former president poses a threat to national security. 

He noted that top secret refers to information that “could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security” if released, while not releasable to foreign nationals suggests that the information was “so sensitive that we as a government don’t even share it with our closest allies.”

Trump was recorded discussing the document, which reportedly outlined potential plans to attack Iran, during a July 2021 meeting with an author and book publisher at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey. The recording, a partial transcript of which was included in the initial indictment, was released by CNN late last month.

“[Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley] said that I wanted to attack Iran, isn’t it amazing?” Trump said in the meeting. “I have a big pile of papers. This thing just came up. Look, this was him. They presented me this — this is off-the-record — but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”

The document appears to have been returned among the first tranche of documents that was given to the National Archives and Records Administration in January 2022, according to the new indictment.

However, Trump has claimed that he didn’t have the actual document in front of him at the meeting, saying his comments were simply “bravado.”

Strzok, who worked on the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Trump and Russia, is currently suing the DOJ for wrongful termination. He was fired from the bureau in 2018, after text messages in which he and then-FBI attorney Lisa Page discussed their personal dislike of Trump became public.

The DOJ appealed a lower court ruling in the case earlier this month that ordered both Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray to sit for depositions.