Former FBI agent Peter Strzok lost his lawsuit against the Justice Department and FBI on Tuesday after a federal judge found that his lawyers failed to prove his dismissal from the bureau violated his First Amendment rights.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in 2019 during President Donald Trump’s first term, Strzok argued that his FBI superiors illegally fired him in retaliation for sending text messages that criticized the president.
Trump, Strzok’s attorneys argued, was irate about the texts he sent while investigating alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, and FBI brass fired him to appease the White House.
In her ruling on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that several years of evidence and testimony collected by Strzok’s legal team from those involved in the 2018 decision to terminate him failed to prove that the 22-year FBI veteran’s rights were violated.
The judge, an Obama appointee, emphasized that she was not ruling on whether Strzok’s termination “was the appropriate sanction” for his actions, but rather that the extensive evidence gathered in the years since the complaint was filed had not shown a violation of his rights.
A summary of Jackson’s ruling — the full decision is currently under seal — showed she also rejected Strzok’s argument that he had entered into a binding deal with a senior FBI disciplinary official, which would have demoted the counterintelligence agent and suspended him for 60 days. The deal was canceled by the FBI’s then-Deputy Director David Bowdich, who fired Strzok.
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