Former Fed Prosecutor Only Needs 2 Minutes To Destroy Peter Strzok's 1st Amendment Claims Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images Former FBI agent Peter Strzok frowns while preparing to testify before the House of Representatives in July 2018. In a court filing Monday, Strzok argued that his firing from the FBI last year was a violation of his First Amendment rights, but former prosecutor and commentator Andrew McCarthy thinks otherwise. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders
Published December 31, 2019 at 9:55am
Even a disgraced former FBI agent should know when he has no case. But Peter Strzok, the one-time head of counterintelligence for the bureau, argued in a court filing Monday that the Justice Department violated his First Amendment right to free speech when he was fired last year for text messages he sent in 2016 to his then-lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page.
As most Americans remember, those texts explicitly insulted the Donald Trump presidential campaign as well as Trump supporters — at the same time that Strzok was investigating allegations that Trump was getting direct Russian help to win the election.
But speaking Tuesday on “Fox & Friends,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy took just two minutes to eviscerate Strzok’s argument, which was filed as part of a lawsuit that demands Strzok get his job back.
It was, McCarthy said, a “no-brainer.”
McCarthy was particularly hard on Strzok’s claim that the Justice Department had violated Strzok’s rights to free speech when it released the legendary Strzok-Page texts. The couple used FBI-provided phones for much of their communication. “You don’t have a right, as a government employee, to use government facilities to do non-government work of any kind,” McCarthy said.
“And if you’re an investigator and you are investigating political corruption cases, you obviously don’t have a right to talk politics, much less politics that connects to the people that you’re investigating on your government-issued communication devices. That’s like a no-brainer.”
Check out the interview here:
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