By Ashe O Washington on August 29 : Former FBI official Peter Strzok claims “any competent foreign intelligence agency” would have attempted to gain access to the former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, which is a source of concern over the storage of “classified documents” of the White House.
Russia, China, Iran and Cuba are all possible countries from which the agents were from, he said.
Strzok who was previously the Deputy Director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, made this observation while talking to MSNBC host Katie Phang on Sunday, the Business Insider reported.He was dismissed from the FBI for sending anti-Trump texts on his personal phone, Trump has frequently attacked his character and has claimed he was an instance of state employees who are bias against him.
Strzok was asked whether Russia was the one that “tried to get into” Mar-a-Lago to obtain classified information, in an obvious reference to the classified documents Trump kept at his Florida residence which were discovered in the FBI’s raid of the property earlier in the month.
“Absolutely the Russians however, not just the Russians any foreign intelligence service, be it members of China or those belonging to Iran to Cuba as well as Russia are all – were, and interested in having access to Mar-a-Lago,” he responded.
Strzok said he considered it “especially alarming” that there was an “absolute absence of any kind of control or formalisation of who was allowed access to Mar-a-Lago at any time”.No matter if classified documents were stored at the resort, it was likely that intelligence services from other countries might have tried to gain access to Mar-a-Lago in the course of and following Trump’s tenure as president, he said.
“And that’s the kind of issue which is something that the US intelligence community as well as the FBI, in particular, will be concerned about .They’ll be trying determine who was allowed access to the storage area and who had access the storage area and what they have to do to prevent any kind of damage that could have resulted,” he added.
Strzok is well-known for his role in launching the investigation into the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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