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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the conversation around the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Frum explains why Trump’s move has triggered backlash from parts of his own base and why it reveals a deeper political fracture inside the MAGA movement.

Then Frum is joined by the former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, who shares his insights on what’s happening at the bureau during Trump’s second term. Strzok, who is still engaged in a lawsuit with the government over his 2018 firing, explains how Trump loyalists such as the FBI’s director, Kash Patel, and its deputy director, Dan Bongino, are dismantling the agency’s national-security functions: purging experts, sidelining investigations, and leaving the United States dangerously vulnerable to terrorism, foreign espionage, and cyberattacks.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who has become a victim of President [Donald] Trump’s campaign of retribution against those who tried to apply law against him. Our topic was the hollowing out of the FBI in the second Trump term, and my original plan was to have a monologue that would address that very specific subject.

But there have been some dramatic events this past weekend at the FBI, including threats of resignation or reported threats of resignation by both the director and the deputy director to protest the attorney general’s directive to shut down the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Because of that, I am changing plans and recording this monologue late on Sunday evening, before the release of the show, which will explain to those of you viewing on YouTube a certain stepping-away from the usual high aesthetic standards we try to maintain for the visuals of The David Frum Show.These dramatic events caught me between planes, and I’m speaking to you from an airport hotel and not one of our usual venues.

I want to offer some thoughts about the Trump-Epstein matter. Let’s look at this for a moment from the point of view of a MAGA supporter, a MAGA believer. Now, if you are such a person, you have refused to take seriously and accepted President Trump’s excuses for a long array of shocking events—including confirmed findings by a civil court of sexual abuse, massive self-enrichment, the attempted overthrow of an American election in 2021—and you have agreed to accept the president’s word on every one of these matters until now.

Suddenly, with the Epstein case, there’s been a mutiny in MAGA world where they’re abruptly no longer accepting, or many of them are no longer accepting President Trump’s orders to step away from an investigation that is embarrassing to him. They’re no longer believing the things that Donald Trump tells them. And the question that those of us who are not in MAGA world must ask is: Why now? Why this?

Now, obviously, the Epstein matter is intensely serious: many, many cases of sexual abuse of underage women and girls, with overlays of financial corruption and many other allegations, including a highly suspicious account of the death of the figure at the center of the case, whether by suicide—even if the official story is suicide, and even if you accept that, there does seem to be something very wrong with the logs. And there are just a lot of questions. So it is a grade-A scandal. I’m not in any way denigrating that scandal to say other scandals that were also important have been shrugged off by MAGA world. What is it about this one?

After all, supposing you were someone who really wanted to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, wouldn’t it be that Donald Trump would be about the last politician in America you would trust to lead the investigation? He and Epstein were friends for a long time. But President Trump, in interviews and other statements, made light of Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to underage women. They spent a lot of time together. They were good friends, and there’s more and more evidence, some of it in a new book by Michael Wolff, of an even closer relationship than that.

And after all, if it is the death that is concerning you about—the suspicious circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein’s death—that happened not during the Bill Clinton presidency, not during the Barack Obama presidency, not during the Joe Biden presidency. The death happened in the Donald Trump presidency in a prison supervised by Trump administration officials.

So if you are wanting to get to the truth of this, why, ever, would you have trusted Donald Trump to do it? And yet so many people in Trump world looked to Donald Trump as the man who would bring this story to truth, and now profess to be shocked and surprised when a person who was so close to Jeffrey Epstein at the last minute says, You know what? We’re closing the book on this matter. No more investigation. Why are they surprised?

I think the answer to that is that MAGA world, or the people in MAGA world who are really excited about the Epstein matter, thought they had a deal with Donald Trump. And the deal was they would look away from the highly specific Trump-Epstein relationship, the connections between—they would make excuses or pretend to believe them or say Donald Trump and Epstein broke off relations at some point in the past, over business matters. Some people will even tell you that Donald Trump discovered late that Epstein was an abuser of women and was so shocked and offended that he broke off his relationship with Epstein. Let those believe that who will.

But they thought they had a deal. Bracket Trump, leave Trump out of the story, and Trump in turn would license them to go on a hunting expedition against all the people they really hated. A long list of liberal icons, people like—people whom they dislike for other reasons who were in the Epstein network. If Trump would just—they would stand back from Trump and he would then deliver to them justice against their ideological and other kinds of opponents. They’re mad, these people, because Trump reneged on that deal. In order to protect himself, he ended up protecting a lot of other people, too, or so people in MAGA world who are excited about this issue believe that this has been taken away from them. And for some of the people who are the loudest influencers, losing the Epstein file, having Donald Trump say, There are no records, there’s nothing to see here, everybody stand down, that’s not just a threat to their belief system. For many of them, it’s a threat to their livelihoods. For a lot of influencers, Epstein was central to their engagement strategies, very lucrative engagement strategies, and they now have the choice: If they accept the Donald Trump edict—if they say, Okay, we’ll stand down, as President Trump says—then what do they do for engagement?

And the Epstein engagement came with an extra-special spicy sauce because for those who really got into this, it was not just an unfortunate coincidence or a happenstance that Jeffrey Epstein’s name happened to be Jeffrey Epstein. For some of the people most excited about Epstein, the fact that Epstein had a Jewish name and a Jewish background opens the door to a whole world of conspiracy that they deeply believe in: a kind of anti-Semitic version of QAnon. Remember: The accusation that Jews are child molesters is one of the foundational myths of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. From Hugh of Lincoln and the belief that Jews were murdering English children to get blood for matzo to Fagin in the Oliver Twist novels, this has been a long line of conspiratorial suspicion and accusation, and Epstein seemed perfectly to fit the bill, especially since Epstein had some relationships with some people in the Israeli government.

And so for the people who want to blow apart the U.S.-Israel relationship, or who wanna believe that Israel is somehow masterminding the United States, Epstein was perfect. And when they see Donald Trump closing down the investigation, that ignites a lot of their fears that Donald Trump may be suspiciously close to Israel too. I won’t say the names. You will know the names. You can easily find the names of the MAGA influencers who have made a very specific point that Epstein is being protected by Trump in order to protect Israel. So this is an essential threat to all of them: an economic threat, an ideological threat. Donald Trump broke the deal. They protect Trump; he gives them Epstein. He’s not giving them Epstein.

Now, all this is to say, Epstein was a genuine, serious sexual and probably financial criminal, and many people do seem to have been involved in this network, and there’s a lot of stuff here to find out. And Donald Trump’s actions over the past days have made it all the more urgent to find—to get to the bottom of this.

But this break between Donald Trump and conspiratorial and the conspiratorial version of the Epstein story may turn out to be of great political significance as well as moral legal significance. The Trump world is composed of many, many different factions, and they’re not all conspiratorial and they’re not all anti-Semitic, but the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic group is important. They’re not negligible. Until now, they’ve had nowhere to go. But you know who’s been a big hunter-down of the Epstein story? That is Elon Musk. Now, when Elon Musk announced the formation of his so-called America Party, I have to admit, I was at the beginning very skeptical that this party would go anywhere. Now, third parties have been important in the American past. The Free Soilers in the 19th century; free-silver and Greenback parties in the 19th century; Prohibitionist parties, socialist parties in the 20th century—those have been important parties. But third parties become important in the following way.

There is an issue—slavery, alcohol, the coinage—that the two big parties, for some reason, don’t want to touch. So it remains, it remains outside the party system, but it’s important and a lot of people care about it, and a lot of people care about it more than they care about anything else. And so people with many important political differences can sink those differences—they’ll say, We’re uniting around the cause of free soil. We’re uniting on the cause of greenback money. We’re uniting on the cause of socialism or temperance and sinking previous disagreements.

So that’s how third parties work. Where third parties fail is when they are just a grab bag of people who are unhappy with the existing two parties. That’s Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 20th century, or Andrew Yang’s Progress Party, or Forward Party, I think it was called, in the 21st century. They were dissatisfied, but dissatisfied for lots and lots of different reasons. So they found it very difficult to agree and to work together, unlike the people who united around the single issue: third parties that have been successful.

So Elon Musk’s America Party looked to me at first a lot like the Ross Perot or Andrew Yang version of a party. He’s got a lot of grievances, highly idiosyncratic to him. He’s looking for other people with other grievances. They may or may not agree with him. It was going to be a mess, and it was going to sink. But suddenly, there’s an opportunity for him to create the kind of single-issue, outside-the-party-system party that has been successful in the past—like Free Soil, like Greenback, like the others. If he turns the America Party into the “get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, no matter how much it hurts Donald Trump” party, that’s something that can unite a lot of people who might otherwise disagree. And it’s a real issue—and as Donald Trump signifies every day, much realer than anybody thought before this weekend. It is a real issue. There is a secret there now; exactly what the secret is, we don’t know, but it seems very worth getting to the bottom of.

I quoted on X, Twitter, an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, with its message, “If the best friend of the deceased villain tells you, Don’t look in that locked closet, that locked closet is the place you need to look.” And if Elon Musk wants to lead the search expedition, he’s going to find a lot of people willing to follow him, and he may be able to make an effectual, damaging third party, after all, something that looks a lot more like the successful third parties of the past. If he simply subtracts from the Trump coalition, its most conspiratorial elements—again, that’s not a majority of American society, that’s not tens of millions of people, but it’s an important part of the Trump coalition. Important enough that Trump gave away Health and Human Services and medical safety in order to appease the conspiratorial anti-vax faction. Now he’s alienated the conspiratorial Epstein faction, and that may be costly to him if they suddenly discover they have a place to go.

And now my conversation with Peter Strzok.

[Music]

Frum: I’m very grateful to welcome today Peter Strzok to The David Frum Show. I imagine that Peter will need very little introduction to most of the viewers and listeners to this program, but just in case: Peter Strzok had national fame thrust upon him against his will. A career FBI officer who specialized in counterintelligence, he was a senior member of the team that investigated both Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and Donald Trump’s tangled connections to the Russian government. When private messages of his were revealed, he became a target of intense personal attack by then-President Trump and by the pro-Trump media. Peter is now fighting a lawsuit for reinstatement and back pay. He teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of the best-selling book Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald [J.] Trump. Peter, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Peter Strzok: David, it’s great to be here with you. Thank you.

Frum: If I may—and don’t go into any more detail than your lawyers will allow—but could you give us a sense of the state of play of the litigation you brought against the United States government and the Trump administration?

Strzok: Sure. So there were two broad aspects of it. The first was that the government had illegally released text messages that I had sent, and that case settled with [the Department of Justice] last year for $1.2 million.

There is an ongoing aspect—which, as you indicated, I want to be careful to respect the court because it is an ongoing process—but essentially, sued under two broad, sort of, aspects. One: that the FBI violated the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint discrimination, notably that because the things I said about Trump led to my termination rather than anything that was outside of protective First Amendment activity. And then some procedural aspects to employment law.

But that case is still ongoing. It’s still, you know, after we filed in 2018, so we’re seven years later, but I have hopes that that will be resolved later this year, and favorably.

Frum: Let me ask you today about your former agency. Donald Trump and the people around him malign the FBI as part of a deep state. And I often think if you remember that when they say the deep state, they mean the rule of law, that’s very clarifying. But there’s some comfort because you think deep state, I guess it’s really solid. It must go deep. It must be hard to damage or remove.

But you’ve often explained that that’s not true, that the FBI is a much more fragile institution than outsiders may understand, more damageable than outsiders understand. What is it? Could you explain the vulnerability of the FBI to malign leadership at the top?

Strzok: Absolutely. And it’s interesting; I take your point that there is some, you know, this idea of the deep state actually in my mind is very much, as you said, the rule of law is and stands for a professional bureaucracy with a capital B that is a professional civil service that we’ve built up over hundreds of years that is not immune from corruption, but is notably different from a lot of places you’ll see in the developing world or even in places like Russia and former Soviet states.

But I think what people—you know, when it comes to the FBI, and we can talk about it maybe a little bit later as well, that, you know, the FBI certainly has a troubled history, a checkered history. If you go back and you look at some of the abuses of the Hoover era, particularly with regard to the civil-rights movement, particularly with regard to offshoots of the fight against communism, and you know, there’s, to be clear, there was a Soviet effort to infiltrate the U.S. government.

There was a Soviet effort to steal the secrets of the atomic and later hydrogen bombs, so the threat from the Soviet Union was real. However, there were certainly under the McCarthy era and sort of the intersection between the Soviet Union and civil society in the U.S.—there were abuses and I think most notably, certainly with some of the bureau’s activities related to Martin Luther King.

But if you look at the reforms that were put in place following the ’70s—and some of that was part of the civil-rights movement, part of that was the establishment of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and the creation of laws to kind of rein in and govern what the FBI was doing—those led to, again, starting in the early, mid-’70s, decades upon decades of sort of guardrails being put up around what the FBI could or could not do, and separating the FBI from—and the Department of Justice—from the political winds coming out of the White House.

Having said that—and I think a lot of people say, Yes, we’re all aware of that. We’re very—you know, there’s this tradition in the FBI and tradition in the DOJ that we’re separated. There’s this wall between DOJ and the White House, and I don’t think people understand that while that is true, a lot of that is not because of law. A lot of that is because of agreement. And if you look at the time of the Church and the Pike Committees, Congress is very much engaged not only in doing investigations, but creating legislation of how are we going to regulate what the IRS does or doesn’t do when it comes to things that the direction of the president are, you know, targeting certain taxpayers or protecting that information? How are we going to regulate what the CIA and other members of the intelligence community, what they’re able to do domestically and not do domestically? And laws were written—not executive orders, but laws out of Congress—limiting and putting sort of an infrastructure around what those organizations could do. When it came to the FBI and DOJ—then I think it was Attorney General [John] Mitchell, if I recall correctly; I might be wrong about that—said, You know what? We don’t need Congress to pass any laws. We can police our own house. We’re going to create these. I think it was Attorney General [Edward] Levi, actually—

Frum: Attorney General Mitchell, John Mitchell went to jail, went to prison, let’s not forget.

Strzok: Yes, he did. He is far from the person who created reform within the bureau, so yeah, sort of the Levi guidelines, right?

Frum: These are the beginning of the modern era of the FBI, which is, okay, there’s the Hoover era with many abuses. There’s a period of rapid chaos under President [Richard] Nixon, but then after, in the Ford administration and afterwards, there was an attempt to put the FBI for the first time on the basis of a sound legal footing with clear delineation of what they could do and what they couldn’t do.

And although for me, maybe for you, the 1970s seem like yesterday, in fact, it’s now half a century that these laws were in place, and those are the laws that are now in question. And my question to you is, I think a lot of people think, well, there’s a limit to what a Kash Patel can do. But as you’ve explained to me in the past, actually either a lot of informal levers that he’s got, and when we hear, for example, that he’s saying, Well, we’re gonna redeploy agents to other cities from Washington—that’s not just a management decision. That’s a tool of power.

Strzok: Yeah, absolutely. And so a couple of points to that. One, there is a tremendous amount of discretion when it comes to the FBI director because these guidelines were not ever sort of enshrined in law. They were things that were internally adhered to by the FBI and by DOJ. But the downside is, they could be easily changed and you see them—Pam Bondi, one of the things she very quickly did is say, We’re going to change, sort of, the rules and regulations about what we do with members of the press. And some of the restrictions when it comes to issuing subpoenas or the process, we’re going to look at those in a different light.

But when it comes to, particularly—any director, but Kash Patel, in particular, some of the things we’ve talked about—the bureau is very small. I mean, sum total is probably roughly 35,000 people. The number of special agents is roughly 13,000. Your listeners might say, Well, that’s actually really large. If there was a company, that would be a huge company. But if you compare and contrast that to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, certainly it’s a very, very small organization. And if you look at the amount of power that the FBI has, and then you sort of create a ratio of number of people compared to the amount of power, it’s an extraordinarily powerful organization. And so for somebody like Kash Patel to be able to come in and say, We are going to shift all of these resources, he has a huge amount of leeway to do that.

Now, some of that—and last point I’ll make on this—some of that’s reasonable, right? Donald Trump ran on immigration. People knew that he separated children from their parents at the border in the first administration, and a plurality of the voters went out and voted for more of that. And so I think we need to be cautious in this debate to be able to say some of the prioritization of the use of the Department of Justice, the use of the FBI, there is a presidential prerogative that elections have consequences. But I think what we’re seeing is not just a shift of Hey—I want you to focus on immigration, but a massive, massive reorganization at the expense of other needs.

Frum: You made the point in one of our conversations that when you hear the FBI director say, We’re going to move 500 agents from Washington, D.C., to Birmingham, Alabama—well, I don’t know if that’s the number, but a certain number—we think of that as, Oh, okay. Well, maybe you should be closer to the different parts of the country. What people don’t understand at the point you made is, FBI agents have spouses with careers, they have children in schools. They have homes and mortgages. When you give the FBI director the power to move a certain number of people from one place to another, you get—and he has discretion over which to pick—you’re giving him an ability to force people out of the bureau because some of the people are told, You have to move. The spouse will say, Well, honey, I can’t move. So I think in the best interest of this family, you will need to find new work. Or, We have a child with a learning disability. There is no school in Birmingham that can help our child. So our family can’t move. And if the director knows that and he says, Aha, there’s an agent I don’t like and that agent has a spouse with an important job or a special-needs child and they can’t move. If I give that agent the order to move to Birmingham, it’s as good as firing that agent.

Strzok: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I mean, there’s a soft-power, sub-rosa element to if you understand that those things can be done, that you can use that ostensibly under the idea of, We’re just shifting resources investigatively. But if you understand full well that, whatever percentage of people aren’t going to do that, or very specifically to your point, if you know somebody that you’re trying to get rid of, or a group of people that you’re trying to get rid of, you can use the prospect of reassignment to increase the cost of staying. And I think we’ve seen that. I mean, I don’t know that it, it’s not specific to, We’re going to move you to a field office to help out ICE with rounding up immigrants. But we have seen—or at least it’s been reported, and I’ve heard through the sort of chain of current and retired agents—a large number of agents who in some way, shape, or form were linked to causes that Kash Patel doesn’t like, and Donald Trump doesn’t like, and Pam Bondi doesn’t like, and so whether they were engaged in investigations surrounding January 6, whether they were engaged in Trump’s alleged maintenance, illegal maintenance of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, whether they were engaged way back—and you still see John Ratcliffe at the CIA releasing things about 2016, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and Russia’s influence on and attacks against the 2016 elections—all of those people you see having these different sorts of formal and informal pressure placed upon them to move them out of the way, either by resignation, retirement, whatever the case may be.

Frum: And the special benefit of a Kash Patel—and again, I only know this because I learned it from you—so, the restraint on perversion of the FBI is that most FBI directors really have cared deeply about the FBI as an institution. And they’ve made, sometimes—even the ones who were not very Trumpy made compromises to protect the FBI from Trump. So if you had an institutionally minded but pro-Trump director, when they got the order, Move people to places, not because there’s a real need to have them go, but because that’s the way you can get rid of the people investigating the president,there are a lot of people who would be pro-Trump but would have proper credentials [and] would say, But I have to protect—those are some of my best people. Like*, The person you want me to fire is my leading expert on currency fraud, my leading expert on counterterrorism. I’m not prepared to lose that person, even though I don’t agree with that person’s politics.*

The special genius of Kash Patel is he just doesn’t care. He has no regard for the FBI as an institution. No, I mean, if we say there’s a special Nobel Prize for Bobby Kennedy Jr. as maybe the worst Cabinet secretary, not just of this administration but of all time, the most inappropriate, the most “who shouldn’t have the job,” Kash Patel may not quite match a pro-polio secretary of Health and Human Services, but he’s an honorable mention, right?

Strzok: Absolutely. And it’s not only malevolence and lack of care; it’s also lack of competence. Like, I mean, he could not—one, he doesn’t care and he is just going to go and do whatever the president—and I think they, what the interesting question is all the people, like, clearly Donald Trump is the motive force and at the FBI, it’s Kash Patel and to a certain extent Dan Bongino who are motive force, but there are people around them who are taking care of the particulars or informing them of the particulars to be acted on.

But for Kash, it’s not just a lack of caring; it’s an utter lack of knowledge. And to my point earlier, like, the FBI is tiny. There are not enough, things we faced every day or that there are not—and the FBI’s not alone in this—the FBI does not have enough personnel and investigators to cover the threats on his plate. There are not enough FBI agents and analysts and investigators to counter all the threats of terrorism, counterintelligence, white-collar crime, public corruption, gang—all of it. You name it, there’s not enough. So it is very much, one, you’re having to prioritize which threats you do work, and it is essentially very much a zero-sum game. If you take people off of one topic, you’re putting them on another, but you’re losing somewhere else. But for Kash Patel, because he never worked in the bureau, because he had no experience in DOJ to speak of other than some line headquarters prosecutor, he would not be able to tell Pam Bondi or any of the people at the White House, Look—if we move these people to work immigration, you’ve got to understand we’re going to not be working on this or not be working on that, and your exposure and your threat in those areas, your call at the end of the day, but if you do this, this is the cost that you’re gonna have to pay in the way that trickles out down the line.

And my hope was he would be so incompetent and so uncaring, he’d be happy to just enjoy the posing and photos and let the professional careers run the place. But I think he’s proven to be a little bit more malicious than that.

Frum: Yeah. Well, also they’re taking the precaution of making sure that he has a similar deputy, that he doesn’t have some by-the-book person. But with the lack of background, the normal response would be, Okay, let’s have a steely, competent, schooled deputy. But instead, they have someone who may be even more committed to Trump. And who does have—I mean, I’ve seen Dan Bongino throw a water bottle at somebody’s head. He does have some impulse-control issues.

I want to ask you about one of the areas where things are not being secured while other priorities go to the fore, and that is specifically the problem of counterterrorism. The United States under President Trump has now struck Iranian nuclear sites. We hope that that is a decisive result and we hope it’s the end of the U.S.-Iran conflict, but it would be unwise to assume that. So Trump keeps insisting it’s all over, but the Iranians get a vote. One obvious move that they would have—they’ve used it before—is to strike targets by terrorism inside the United States and targets of interest to the United States around the world. What is the state of our counterintelligence facilities? There are a lot of reports that suggest there have been important resignations, that there are less qualified people running counterterrorism. How does that look to you?

Strzok: Well, I think there is very much a greater vulnerability than there was prior to Kash Patel showing up. I mean, I think the problem with Trump—and this is a microcosm—there’s a lack of understanding that all these external actors have agency, right? We’re going to treat our Western European allies like crap, not understanding in Canada, there’d be a 51st state, not understanding that, you know, that these are people and entities and states that are going to respond in a certain way. Well, the same thing goes for a terrorist organization. The same thing goes for Iran, which, as you know is—in terms of the size and national capacity—is an economic force from the Middle East to South Asia, is a significant, huge, huge country, particularly when you line it up against many other Gulf states. So when you take the double sort of factor of one, a direct physical violent action against Iran and their nuclear capacity. When you take what has gone on—at least reportedly in the press and what I’ve heard—that a large number of people who were being forced out, whether because they were perceived to be loyal to [Christopher Wray or God forbid, Joe Biden. The sort of winnowing process as you move up the chain in the FBI takes a long time. I mean, you go—again, like many organizations, but at the FBI as an agent—the people who arrive, traditionally, at the senior level of the organizations have gone through a variety of assignments, both in the field as an investigator, as well as at headquarters doing a variety of things to gain expertise, to run larger programs, to interact with the interagency community and to understand, say, you’re a counterterrorism agent. You’ve worked as an investigator, perhaps against the IRGC. Maybe you’ve worked against a QAP; you’ve come back to headquarters—

Frum: What are IRGC and QAP?

Strzok: So the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. So Iran, in an intelligence and counterterrorism aspect, largely exercises external power through client terrorist organizations through either the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds force, in particular the IRGC, but also some activity through their foreign-intelligence service, which is the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS.

Frum: And what is a QAP?

Strzok: Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula. So that’s a, you know, not necessarily, that isn’t, I wouldn’t call them certainly at all, an Iranian client organization. But in the terrorism context, as an agent, you’re going to work a variety of these different targets, both as an investigator and then back at headquarters. And maybe you’re supervising all these different cases across the FBI. Maybe you’re embedded at the CIA. Maybe you’re interacting from time to time with Congress helping to draft legislation. And you move up the chain gathering greater and greater experience.

And so by the time it gets to the point where you’re on that senior staff advising the director and deputy director what to do, you’ve had probably 20 years of various experience learning this and doing this. Well, when you come in with purges, and you’re Patel and Bongino and trying to get rid of everybody so you can bring in people—and again, director of the FBI largely, it depends, but typically is an external-facing figure. They interact with the Hill; they interact with the public; they interact with the White House. The deputy director of the FBI traditionally has always been an agent—Dan Bongino first in memory who isn’t—who has a deep understanding of how the bureau works and an accomplished track record within that organization.

So then they’re gonna rely on the next level down, which all go by the title of executive assistant directors, EAD. Well, they’ve forced all those people out. And in some cases, the level below that they’ve forced out—the assistant directors, the people in charge of the counterterrorism division, the person in charge of the counterintelligence division, the person in charge of the criminal division. Well, if you force those next two levels out, you’ve essentially got two people at the top who have no idea what they’re doing relying now on the fifth level down—not to say they’re not good agents there, but they just haven’t had the time to sort of gain that experience to be able to advise at the level that they’re suddenly being asked to do.

So that’s a very long-winded way to your question. When it then comes to—we’ve bombed Iran, we are supporting in many ways Israeli efforts against Iran—that when it comes to a potential Iranian response, whether that’s through proxies, whether they have sleeper personnel here, whether they have visitors capable of coming into the United States, whether they have established capabilities out of the Iranian intersection or the mission to the UN. The people who know that, the people who are on the street who have that knowledge, one, at a senior level may be gone; two, at a street level, may have gotten pulled to go work, to your point, immigration in Birmingham. So there’s a real—there aren’t sort of idle agents, the Maytag repairman just sort of sitting around waiting for a call. If you are moving somebody to work on a task, you are necessarily removing them from whatever they were doing before. And in some cases that’s going to be terrorism. And if you say, Okay, well, it’s true—we’re gonna continue our focus on Iran, well, then you’re gonna have to find your pound of flesh somewhere else. And so maybe you’re not looking at other, you know—

Frum: I want to get to the other thing; I want to say something more about counterterrorism. This is actually one of the anecdotes I did not learn from you about the FBI, but at the senior level of the FBI, it is a deluge of information about things, terrible things that could happen. And most of the information is wrong. It’s either false from the beginning or it’s exaggerated, or it’s tainted, and a lot of the bureaucracy of the FBI is a sorting mechanism to be able to rapidly to work through false positives—and by the way, this is not just tips from a concerned citizen. These are foreign governments that—sometimes the foreign government has information. Sometimes it’s imperfect. Sometimes they have an agenda. They want you to look at somebody for whom they’re mad at for some other reason.

But there’s this deluge and so a lot of what the FBI has set up to do is to sift—I guess you don’t sift a deluge—but to strain the deluge of information and with always the fear that you might miss a true positive, which would be, as happened, that’s 9/11, that all the information to stop 9/11 was present somewhere inside the United States government. It just was never connected in ways that allowed the government to act effectively and save all the lives that could have been saved. So you’re haunted by that memory, and so when you start breaking things, it’s not just that you’re not in the field sniffing for clues, it’s that you have no way of managing this onslaught of vast quantities of warnings, of terrible things that might happen.

Strzok: Right. I think that’s an excellent point. I entirely agree with that. Part of what you do is, there’s a continuum of that sort of lesson as a baby investigator, as a probationary agent learning to understand what things are worth doing and what things are kind of spinning your wheels. And that’s whether you’re working an individual case or whether you expand out and you’re running an entire program, whether that’s the entire terrorism program, the entire counterintelligence program, to have that sort of expertise that builds up over time to understand that if I’m faced with allegation one or element of information one, if it’s bona fide, one, I would expect to see all of these other things. And here are the people I can ask to inform me whether those things are present or not. Or ordinarily, if they were present, they would be telling me. And because I’m not hearing it from them, I’m going to question that and know, Hey—why aren’t we seeing this from this internal element? Or, Why aren’t we hearing this from the NSA? Whatever.

And it’s very hard to sit there and to explain to anybody in two minutes on a podcast or a four-minute answer at a congressional hearing, how complex those systems are. And it kills me—and I don’t want to turn this into a gripe session about the senior management of the FBI—Dan Bongino goes on Fox News and he acts astonished that everything we face is a 10 out 10, like the nines out 10, we don’t even hear it. And I barely get home to see my wife and it’s like we’re divorced. It’s like, Dude, what the hell do you think has been going on for the past 20, 30, 40 years by all the people at the FBI and you’ve been on the job for five minutes and you’re complaining? It’s like, yes.

And the problem is: If you don’t have that expertise, you are going to tend to flail. And if you’ve gotten rid of all the other people who can act as sort of wise consiglieres to tell you, Look, boss—it sounds bad, but this really is probably not what we should be focusing on. Let whoever run this out. Here are the things that you really need to focus on. Those people, those voices don’t exist anymore, and there’s only so much you can do to reach down and pluck somebody up—again, there are a lot of really great agents and analysts, but they just, they don’t have that benefit. You can’t suddenly bestow on somebody an extra five years of senior experience. You can’t do that. And that’s what they’re missing, if they care to begin with. And I’m not certain they do. Part of me thinks, there are things they do care about—child predators, I think they actually care about, violent crime I think they care about.

Frum: Why do you think they care? What makes you think that? Because they falsely accuse innocent people being child predators all the time.

Strzok: I think some of it, it plays into, they have this image—and you see it, whether it’s Kash Patel or Kristi Noem—all these people, and they’re playing dress-up, right? They’ve got their tactical gear on. Kash Patel wears this little badge around. I think they have an image in their mind’s eye informed by what they’ve seen coming out of Hollywood about what a sexy FBI or whatever it is they’re cosplaying. And so those things that they think are easy to articulate, they’re going to lean into that and say, We took this many child predators out of play. Good thing. But I would argue a lot of different things the FBI should be focused on in addition to that.

Frum: Yeah. I’m not going to concede that—I think if you’re attracted to crazy conspiracy theories about child predators, you’re not that interested in child predators. Someone who cared about child predators would say, You know what? I’m going to invest the time to learn about this issue and see where the threats are because, obviously, child abuse is a huge problem.

You’d learn about it. And if you can’t be bothered to learn about something, and if you instead get all your information from insane QAnon groups, that tells me, you know what? You don’t actually care what you, you care about pursuing tribal enemies and you want to accuse them of the worst thing you can believe that they might be guilty of, but you don’t care enough about the underlying issue to learn, how does it work? Where are the guilty? Where are the non-guilty? How do you apportion resources? How do you really chase this thing down in a way that actually will save children? If you can’t be bothered to learn, I don’t believe you really care.

Strzok: Yeah, and I think they’re fundamentally lazy, and I’m talking about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. I think Kash Patel has spent the, you know, entirety of his life cozying up to political figures that he could hitch his wagon to, whether it’s Devin Nunes and then Donald Trump and otherwise selling God knows what on various podcasts, whether it’s, you know, I don’t know, but things that are not of substantive value.

And same with Bongino. You know, manufacturing and selling outrage for a podcast does not create a value add to society.

Frum: Hey! (Laughs.)

Strzok: It is selling outrage, not informing. (Laughs.) There’s informing with informed reasonable expertise. And then there’s just selling outrage that—I don’t think they care.

And some of it—I mean, again, you know, one of the built-in good things I think about the FBI is it’s too big for them to have a role in field officers out there investigating crime. And so sometimes when you get successful investigations leading to arrest, I’m willing to grant the argument that they’re not truly interested in whatever it is. But when they’re presented with the fact that the Miami Field Office just arrested these 12 people for topic X, if that makes for a sexy tweet—and by the way, we can open for debate, I have never seen any FBI director, let alone deputy director on social media—But one thing that Patel and Bongino were doing, prolifically, are posting to Twitter/X, going on Fox News, going on Joe Rogan. They are playing like everybody in the Trump ecosphere; they’re playing social media in a fundamentally different way than has ever been done by the FBI. And we can debate whether it’s good or bad, but it has a different impact. And the question is gonna be: When we, God willing, return to normal times, should we maintain that? Or is that something we should try and put back in the box? But that’s an interesting phenomenon.

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