Narrator: What if the leaders of a nation's top law enforcement agency gathered in a secure room to debate a question that was once unthinkable: whether the President of the United States himself posed a national security threat? This isn't a political thriller. It was the reality inside the FBI's Counterintelligence Division in early 2017. The team faced an unprecedented dilemma, weighing their duty to protect the country against the constitutional crisis that would erupt from investigating a sitting president. How did the FBI get to this point, and what evidence led them to consider such a drastic step? In his book Compromised, former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok provides an insider’s account of the investigations that forced the Bureau to confront this very question.

Narrator: Before the political firestorms of 2016, Peter Strzok’s world was defined by the patient, meticulous work of hunting foreign spies. A prime example is the case he calls "Ghost Stories," an investigation into a network of Russian "illegals." These were not embassy officials with diplomatic immunity but deep-cover agents living seemingly ordinary American lives. One couple, known as Don Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their two children while Don attended Harvard. To their neighbors, they were a normal Canadian family. In reality, they were Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, elite officers of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR.

The FBI’s investigation into them was a masterclass in counterintelligence. It involved years of surveillance, but the breakthrough came from a covert operation. One night, an FBI team, including forensics experts, broke into the bank where the couple kept a safety deposit box. Inside, they found cash, a birth certificate, and, most importantly, strips of 35mm photo negatives. Back at the lab, under a microscope, a tiny detail emerged. The edge of the film was stamped with the word "TACMA" in the Cyrillic alphabet, which translates to TASMA—a well-known Russian film company. This single, microscopic clue was the concrete link that proved the all-American couple was, in fact, a product of Moscow. This case illustrates the fundamental principles of counterintelligence: the enemy is often hiding in plain sight, and the work requires immense patience and a deep understanding of how adversaries use deception, blackmail, and compromised individuals, or kompromat, to achieve their goals.

Narrator: In 2016, the FBI was thrust into the center of a political inferno with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, codenamed "Midyear Exam." The core questions were whether classified information was mishandled and if the server had been compromised by foreign actors. After a massive, resource-intensive investigation, the team concluded that while Clinton and her staff had been "extremely careless" in their handling of classified information, there was no evidence of willful intent to break the law, which is the standard required for prosecution.

The case seemed closed. But in late October, just eleven days before the presidential election, a bombshell landed. While investigating former congressman Anthony Weiner for sexting with a minor, agents discovered a laptop he shared with his wife, Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. That laptop contained hundreds of thousands of emails, some of which could be relevant to the closed Clinton investigation. FBI Director James Comey was now in an impossible position. If he said nothing and the emails later proved significant, the FBI would be accused of a cover-up. If he disclosed the new development, he would be accused of interfering in the election. Fearing that concealing the information would be worse, Comey sent a letter to Congress, reigniting the controversy. The emails ultimately changed nothing about the case's conclusion, but the political damage was done, placing the FBI at the center of a partisan war it could not win.

Narrator: While the Clinton email investigation dominated headlines, a far more alarming threat was emerging. In July 2016, the FBI received a piece of intelligence that Strzok describes as a "300-pound cannonball" landing in the still waters of their counterintelligence work. The information came from a trusted ally: Australia. An Australian diplomat reported that months earlier, he had been at a London bar with a young Trump campaign foreign policy advisor named George Papadopoulos. Over drinks, Papadopoulos boasted that he knew the Russians had political "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails and had offered to help the Trump campaign by releasing it.

This was not just another hack. It was a specific offer of assistance from a hostile foreign power to a U.S. presidential campaign. This intelligence, combined with the ongoing Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic Party and Donald Trump's public call for Russia to "find the 30,000 emails that are missing," triggered the opening of a new, top-secret investigation codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane." Its purpose was to determine if anyone in the Trump campaign was coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's interference in the election.

Narrator: After Donald Trump's surprise victory, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation took on a terrifying new dimension. The FBI was now investigating the associates of the president-elect. The situation escalated quickly. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was caught lying to the FBI and Vice President Pence about his secret conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in which he discussed sanctions imposed by the Obama administration. Flynn’s lies made him a prime target for Russian blackmail.

Soon after, President Trump held a private dinner with Director Comey, where he demanded loyalty. When Comey refused, Trump later cornered him in the Oval Office and asked him to "let this go," referring to the Flynn investigation. When Comey continued the investigation, Trump fired him. This act of firing the man leading the investigation into his campaign was the final straw. For Strzok and the FBI leadership, it was a direct assault on the rule of law. It was this series of events—the lies, the pressure, the firing—that led them to take the unprecedented step of opening a counterintelligence investigation into the President of the United States himself, to determine if he was acting as an agent of a foreign power or was compromised by one.

Narrator: The firing of James Comey led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, who took over the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. But as the investigation proceeded, it faced a relentless campaign of attacks from the President and his allies. Strzok himself became a central target after his private text messages, critical of Trump, were leaked to the media. He was accused of being the leader of a "deep state" conspiracy to undermine the president.

Strzok argues this was part of a broader pattern of behavior described in the book's epigraph from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: a state where the lie becomes a pillar of government. He points to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report, which he argues misrepresented its findings to create a false narrative of exoneration. Strzok connects this to Trump's later dealings with Ukraine, where he withheld military aid to pressure a foreign leader into manufacturing dirt on a political opponent. For Strzok, these are not separate scandals but part of the same "arc of corruption"—a willingness to solicit foreign help and use the power of the state to create and spread lies for personal political gain, posing a grave and ongoing threat to American democracy.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Compromised is that the threat to American democracy was not just a foreign plot, but a domestic vulnerability. Peter Strzok argues that Donald Trump's personal and financial entanglements made him uniquely susceptible to foreign influence, and his actions as president consistently prioritized his own self-interest over national security. The FBI's investigation was not a "witch hunt," but a necessary response to an unprecedented counterintelligence risk emanating from the Oval Office itself.

The book leaves us with a chilling question that extends far beyond one election or one president: What happens when a nation’s leader is perceived by its own intelligence experts as a potential national security threat? It challenges us to consider that the ultimate defense against foreign interference isn't just strong intelligence agencies, but a vigilant public and leaders who are, without question, uncompromised.