Fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok Suing to Get Job Back

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, famous for his anti-Trump text messages among other allegations of malfeasance, is now suing to get his job back. He posted on Twitter a letter alleging that he was wrongfully terminated and had his First and Fifth Amendment rights violated.

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday claims that his rights to free speech and due process were violated in his 2018 firing as the result of "political pressure" and that "the Administration's purposeful disregard constitutional rights must not be tolerated."

The letter issued by litigation firm Zuckerman Spaeder states the following: 

Strzok was fired based on his text messages critical of the president, despite such communications being protected free speech. According to the lawsuit, 'There has been no such assertion, nor could there be, that the political speech engaged in by Special Agent Strzok violated the Hatch Act.' And, even if a violation could be shown, the 'government cannot practice viewpoint discrimination in deciding what political speech by government employees to allow and what political speech to punish.'

According to Fox News, 

The suit provides new details about the circumstances of Strzok's firing and amounts to the latest defense of his reputation, coming months after a fiery congressional hearing in which he insisted that his personal views never influenced his work.

Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent who also helped lead FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, was removed from Mueller's team after the texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page came to light. He was fired from the FBI last August.

Many of the texts, on FBI cell phones, were bitingly critical of Trump during his 2016 run for office. They were found by the Justice Department's inspector general during its investigation of the FBI's Clinton email probe.

The watchdog office criticized both Strzok and Page, with whom he was having an affair, for their judgment in sending the messages but did not find that the Clinton email investigation was compromised by political bias.

President Trump criticized Strzok, who worked on the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and was later put on former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, as a "fraud" and accused him of helping start the "illegal Rigged Witch Hunt".