FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok on Capitol Hill, July 12, 2018.
Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated PressU.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen found much wrong with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of Mike Flynn. An aspect that deserves more attention than it has received is the alteration of an FBI agent’s account of the Flynn interview.
For more than half a century, FBI agents conducting interviews have been required to memorialize any information that might become testimony, on a form called the FD-302. It was always considered the interviewing agent’s FD-302. Supervisors never modified it; its purpose was to reflect what the agent observed and heard from the witness or suspect. As an FBI supervisor, I reviewed hundreds of FD-302s. Other than an occasional grammatical correction, I never changed a word.
So it was shocking for me to read the newly released text messages between Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and Lisa Page. They show that after Mr. Strzok and Agent Joe Pientka interviewed Mr. Flynn, Mr. Strzok heavily edited Mr. Pientka’s FD-302—to the point that he told Ms. Page he was “trying not to completely re-write” it. Even more shocking, Ms. Page, an FBI attorney who wasn’t an agent and wasn’t at the interview, provided edits.
Worse still, the FD-302 that was eventually provided to the court wasn’t that of the agents’ interview of Mr. Flynn. It was instead a FD-302 of an interview of Mr. Strzok, conducted months later, about his recollections of the original interview. Truly bizarre.
The FBI was also aggressive in its use—or abuse—of Title 18, Section 1001, which makes it a crime to lie to an agent. Agents sometimes issue warnings about this violation to encourage witnesses to tell the truth. But in the past lying was seldom prosecuted as a stand-alone crime. Over the decades, many frustrated agents have pounded a prosecutor’s desk after being told this wouldn’t be prosecuted because “everybody lies.” Instead prosecutors treated it as an add-on offense when they’d already have nailed down a substantive underlying crime. In the Flynn case it was a perversion. Rather than using the 1001 warning to get to the truth, agents set a trap for a lie to manufacture a violation. That would be unimaginable in my time at the FBI.
Many are calling for indictments of past bureau officials and others who engaged in this treatment of Mr. Flynn. That may be warranted. But more fundamental is the need for cultural reform in the FBI. The guardrails that were respected in the past—including the integrity of an agent’s FD-302 and the appropriate use of 1001—need to be restored.
Attorney General William Barr ordered this inquiry by Mr. Jensen, a 10-year FBI veteran who operated within those guardrails. Mr. Barr, who served as attorney general in the early 1990s, knows what the FBI had been and can be again.
Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché.
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