The following is an excerpt from Senator Ted Cruz’s new book Justice Corrupted.
Based on nothing more than this rumor, the FBI launched an operation to uncover any links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. The investigation, which was code-named Crossfire Hurricane and led by James Comey and his hyper-partisan deputy, Andrew McCabe, also comprised several smaller investigations. In this respect, it was not unlike the insane Operation GEMSTONE plan that G. Gordon Liddy had cooked up for Richard Nixon. In the case of McCabe and Comey, however, the names were much less entertaining. Crossfire Razor was an investigation designed to look into Michael Flynn, President Trump’s incoming national security advisor; Crossfire Fury would look into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s onetime campaign manager. A furious razor in a hurricane, that’s how the DOJ approached the incoming Trump administration.
Almost as soon as they opened the investigation, McCabe and Comey authorized the use of spying. To do this, they needed to file an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA Court, making the case that the target of their investigation was worth the effort of wiretapping and intelligence gathering they were proposing. At first, when they attempted to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page (a professor and foreign policy advisor loosely affiliated with the Trump campaign), the FISA Court came back and said that the evidence — or, rather, the lack of evidence — they had submitted was insufficient. So they went back to the FISA Court with the Steele Dossier. Thanks to the lurid accusations contained therein, they soon had warrants to spy on Carter Page. Crossfire Hurricane.
Repeatedly, the strained efforts of the FBI revealed no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Every time they attempted to make a link, they failed. Yet they continued to renew their FISA warrants, hoping that eventually, they would be able to nail President Trump on something.
Why? The answer is simple. The intelligence community saw President Trump as an existential threat — someone who would come from the outside and shake things up. He needed to be taken down at any cost.
Anyone who doubted the deep hatred that organizations like the FBI harbored for President Trump needed only to look at the long series of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok, a major figure on the Crossfire Hurricane team, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an adulterous affair at the time. Reading through these texts, the nation would soon learn just how deep the hatred for President Trump ran.
In one text, sent in August 2016, shortly after Strzok had begun working on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Page said, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok, who knew exactly what was going on behind the scenes, replied “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
The rest of these conversations have been well reported, so they don’t bear much repeating here. But the point is clear. These two partisans — like much of the senior leadership of the DOJ and FBI — loathed Donald Trump, and they would do anything to stop him from becoming president. In addition to revealing a strange proclivity for pillow talk involving Donald Trump (which I, along with most of America, found quite odd), they also reveal a government bureaucracy that was dead set on keeping Trump out of office. In one of these texts, sent in March 2016, Strzok asked Page whether Donald Trump might potentially be “a worse president than Cruz,” to which she responded in the affirmative, calling Trump “awful” and “an idiot.” Given that I was also running for president at the time, I think it’s safe to assume that “Cruz” referred to me. If Peter Strzok and Lisa Page didn’t like me at the time, I must have been doing something right.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is the author of the new book: Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, Regnery Publishing (October 25, 2022).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.