{"id":19361,"date":"2025-09-24T10:24:58","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T09:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/?p=19361"},"modified":"2025-09-24T09:32:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T08:32:16","slug":"peter-strzok-the-fbi-agent-who-sent-anti-trump-texts-loses-first-amendment-case-over-his-firing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/24\/peter-strzok-the-fbi-agent-who-sent-anti-trump-texts-loses-first-amendment-case-over-his-firing\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who sent anti-Trump texts, loses First Amendment case over his firing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has lost a long-running lawsuit<\/a>claiming he was illegally fired during Donald Trump\u2019s first term after sending text messages that criticized Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strzok argued in the lawsuit that his FBI bosses had retaliated against him in order to placate Trump, who was outraged over texts that Strzok exchanged while investigating ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that, after several years gathering evidence and testimony from those involved in the 2018 decision to terminate the veteran counterintelligence agent, Strzok\u2019s lawyers had failed to show that his dismissal violated his First Amendment rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson, an Obama appointee, stressed that she was not ruling on whether Strzok\u2019s firing \u201cwas the appropriate sanction\u201d for his conduct, only that the voluminous evidence<\/a>assembled over years of litigation \u2014 including a deposition of Trump himself<\/a> \u2014 had not proven Strzok\u2019s rights were violated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson\u2019s full ruling is under seal, for now. But she disclosed a summary<\/a> Tuesday that showed she also rejected Strzok\u2019s argument that he had struck a binding deal with a top FBI disciplinary official under which Strzok would have been demoted and suspended for 60 days. The FBI\u2019s deputy director at the time, David Bowdich, nixed that arrangement and fired Strzok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strzok, who worked as an agent for the FBI for 22 years before his firing, can appeal Jackson\u2019s decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. His attorney, Aitan Goelman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ruling ends one chapter in one of the lengthiest legal sagas stemming from Trump\u2019s first term, when he grew increasingly furious over the criminal and counterintelligence probes of his 2016 campaign\u2019s contacts with Russia. The discovery of the anti-Trump text messages \u2014 including one in which Strzok suggested the FBI might \u201cstop\u201d Trump from becoming president \u2014 helped Trump cast those probes as a corrupt \u201cwitch hunt\u201d and embroil the bureau in years of controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The imbroglio became tabloid fodder, as well, after it was revealed that Strzok and the FBI lawyer with whom he exchanged many of the texts, Lisa Page, were having an affair at the time. Trump seized on that aspect of the story and mounted numerous attacks on Strzok and Page on social media and in public, sometimes disparaging Page in crude terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strzok has long denied<\/a> that his personal views about Trump influenced his actions on the job, and a lengthy inspector general review found no evidence that the Russia probe was affected by bias. But the saga helped Trump rally his supporters and regain his footing after a rocky start to his presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Strzok and Page filed separate lawsuits over the episode. Page, who quit the FBI in 2018, claimed that the Justice Department\u2019s disclosure of her text messages to reporters violated the Privacy Act. Strzok\u2019s suit made similar claims but also challenged his firing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, during the Biden administration, the Justice Department agreed to pay Page $800,000 to settle her suit and to pay Strzok $1.2 million to settle his privacy-invasion claims<\/a>. Strzok\u2019s claims related to his firing were not part of the settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FBI Director Kash Patel, a longtime Trump loyalist, recently faced questions from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) about the settlements paid to Strzok and Page, with demands that Patel identify the FBI officials who authorized them. Patel said the agreements were \u201creached in the Biden administration when my predecessor was director.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has lost a long-running lawsuitclaiming he was illegally fired during Donald Trump\u2019s first term after sending text messages that criticized Trump. Strzok argued in the lawsuit that his FBI bosses had retaliated against him in order to placate Trump, who was outraged over texts that Strzok exchanged while investigating ties between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-international","category-jobs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.funminews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-58.png?fit=768%2C512&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19363,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19361\/revisions\/19363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}