Opinion
By Jeff Childers, 4-11-25
The Crossfire Hurricane declass dropped, and the chips are starting to fall; three terrific immigration stories; astonishing progress in Trump’s public Cabinet meeting; a bold claim; and more.
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! I have good news and bad news. The first bit of good news is we DON’T HAVE TO TALK ABOUT TARIFFS TODAY. That particular media crisis has been averted. The second bit is the Crossfire Hurricane documents dropped last night. The bad news is I couldn’t stop looking at them, so today’s post is less polished than usual. Please bear with me. I also lack time to write up the usual recap, so you’ll have to trust me. The best bit is at the end. You’re going to love it.
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In a story that corporate media completely ignored —and I mean completely— Just the News published the redacted Crossfire Hurricane Binder early last night. The article, headlined “Read the Russia collusion memos President Trump declassified and Kash Patel gave to Congress,” provides a loosely organized index to categories of documents adding up to over 700 pages of government sausage-making.
I suspect that mockingbird media’s silence is because it is mad that FBI Director Kash Patel scooped them, by disclosing the documents through conservative media like Just the News. Like spurned middle-school mean girls, they’re waiting for Kash to invite them to the party to their faces.
This morning I got sucked into Crossfire Hurricane’s vortex, the digital version of excitedly flipping through the binder to see if I could get lucky and land on something spicy. Once I started I couldn’t stop. Nothing I saw in my drive-by leapt out as a smoking gun though, so we’ll have to wait for our subject matter experts to have a look. I did, however, notice the thirty four pages of Peter Strzok text messages —single-spaced!— and those will shatter any false fantasy you might still be harboring about the so-called non-partisan federal workforce.
Here are a few of the more troubling Peter “Insurance Policy” Strzok texts, but believe me, there were far too many problematic ones to include in today’s post. Remember— this was the dedicated, apolitical public servant in charge of the FBI’s “espionage” division and assigned to lead the Trump investigation. At various times, Strzok texted the following:
- “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?! No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” (8/8/2016)
- “Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his Presidency would be.” (7/21/2016)
- “And fck the cheating motherfcking Russians. Bastards. I hate them.” (7/19/2016)
- “OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS. What the hell has happened to our country!?!?!??” (8/11/2016)
- “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support….” (8/26/2016)
- (During presidential debates) “I am riled up. Trump is a f-cking idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.” (10/19/2016)
- “Oh hot damn. HRC is throwing down saying Trump in bed with Russia.” (10/19/2016)
- “God this is so depressing. NYTimes: Fears That Trump’s Visa Ban Betrays Friends and Bolsters Enemies” (1/28/2017)
- “Did you read this? It’s scathing. And I’m scared. Why Donald Trump Should Not Be President” (9/26/2016)
When Peter Strzok bragged in one of his texts about being “in charge of espionage,” he meant that he was the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, which deals primarily with espionage, foreign influence, and intelligence operations. In other words, he oversaw covert and highly sensitive FBI investigations into spying activities conducted by foreign governments, including Russia.
Put bluntly, the U.S. government gave Peter Strzok the full surveillance toolkit specifically intended to spy on other governments—warrants, wiretaps, informants, sophisticated cyber-monitoring, nearly limitless database access—essentially the entire intelligence apparatus of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Using these tools to target a domestic presidential campaign was, by comparison, child’s play.
Moreover, the government provided a perfect protective shield: the secrecy and top-secret cover inherently necessary when dealing with espionage and foreign threats. They needed that heavy blanket of classification and security precisely because FBI counterintelligence involves extremely sensitive, politically fraught activities.
In short, Strzok wasn’t merely empowered to spy—he was practically invited to do it, cloaked by layers of secrecy and shielded from scrutiny by design. All he needed was motive — and his texts reek with the foul odors of motive — and the tiniest push or slyest wink of approval from some as-yet-unidentified higher-up.
But why would he? Because Peter Strzok’s warped brain was consumed with obsessive hatred for two concepts: a media-made caricature of Donald J. Trump and a pathological hatred of all of Russia. It’s probably because he’s of Polish descent and hard feelings from the Soviet era still run deep. If Peter weren’t such a rabid leftist, the rest would easily recognize his Russophobia as racist. Stereotypes!
Trump and Russia were Peter’s two mortal enemies, his twin fixations, locked in a perpetual orbit of obsession, and they created the ideal psychological conditions for a deep-state conspiracy: the conviction that Trump and Russia must be intricately connected somehow. And in a cosmic irony beyond mortal comprehension, the Divine Ruler of the Universe placed this precise madman—Peter Strzok—in the precise FBI office at the precise historical moment necessary to weaponize his rabid animosities into official government action.
Strzok’s poisonous personal agenda didn’t just destabilize a presidency; it fractured trust in American institutions, reshaped geopolitics, and unleashed global chaos whose reverberations continue echoing today. It’s a breathtaking example of how dangerously far one corrupt bureaucrat can reach, especially when surrounded by willfully blind enablers and shielded by sympathetic secrecy.
Fueled by DEI incompetence and raw political ambition, aided by uncountable sold-out sympathizers and co-conspirators, and sheltered from scrutiny by official secrecy, the unchecked burning hatred and personal conspiracy theories of one shadowy backroom bureaucrat —Peter Strzok— knocked the entire world off its axis.
🔥 Strzok has avoided prosecution mainly because he’s comfortably situated within the very system responsible for holding him accountable—the federal bureaucracy and intelligence community. He’s not just protected by particular individuals who could be replaced; he’s shielded by an institutional impulse toward self-preservation.
The club takes care of its own, because prosecuting one member risks exposing systemic abuses that would implicate many more. If you tip over the Peter Strzok domino, who knows how many others could fall?
Strzok represents an entire class or category of intelligence bureaucrats whose actions blur political and investigative boundaries. Prosecuting him would set a precedent— a precedent threatening the club’s historic insulation from scrutiny or accountability. Thus, despite clear evidence of misconduct —his overt bias, improper conduct, and misuse of surveillance powers, just for a start— the system hesitates.
Peter Strzok hasn’t faced charges because he’s inside the protected circle, where accountability rarely penetrates. In Washington’s power game, privileged club membership grants immunity from the rules everyone else has to follow.
🔥 “Treason” is a legally precise (and deliberately narrow) term under U.S. law. To qualify as treason under the Constitution, someone must levy war against the United States or give aid and comfort to its enemies. Strzok’s obsessive hatred toward Trump and Russia —and even misusing surveillance tools against a presidential candidate— might be unethical, improper, abusive, or illegal under various statutes, but it doesn’t neatly fit the constitutional definition of treason.
In other words, Strzok’s behavior is certainly corrupt, probably criminal, and unquestionably dangerous to our democratic form of government. But you can’t call it “treason” in a strictly legal sense.
Instead, Strzok’s wrongdoing is better described as abuse of power or corruption—which are serious crimes in their own right, even if they don’t technically amount to constitutional “treason.”
At bottom, what Strzok did is deeply troubling and arguably criminal, but it probably falls short of the constitutional bar set by the framers for treason. Still, in everyday terms, many would consider his betrayal of public trust plenty “treasonous.”
🔥 Just the News ran its first story on the declassified binder last night headlined, “Newly declassified FBI memos detail concerns, payments to Russia collusion informant.” They mainly focused on FBI “informant” Stefan Halper, another colorful Crossfire character.
Alongside ‘retired’ British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, FBI agents used Halper, a portly Pentagon consultant and academic, as a paid informer to cement the Crossfire Hurricane case against Trump and his advisers during the dramatic last days of the 2016 election and the rocky commencement of Trump’s first term in office.
Stefan Halper, 80, is an American who served in various U.S. government roles, holding official positions in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. More recently, he spent decades living in the UK, teaching at Cambridge University, and collaborating with British intelligence. Unsurprisingly, Halper is a textbook “deep stater.” His long-term bureaucratic career across various presidential administrations was consistently embedded at the nexus of intelligence, policy, and national security, particularly tied to sensitive intelligence matters and political maneuvering.
“The newly-disclosed memos,” the article explained, “confirm Halper was the source of one of the most sensational bogus claims to land in the FBI’s probe in summer 2016: that General Mike Flynn had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with Russia scholar Svetlana Lokhova when he was a three-star general leading the Defense Intelligence Agency.” The memo also says Halper’s report was “not plausible” and “not accurate,” but they kept paying Halper and using his intel anyway.
The article reported that, in spite of the bad Halper information, special agent Peter Strzok stopped the FBI from closing its investigation into Flynn in early 2017.
In one of the more remarkable passages, the FBI’s “source evaluation unit” (VMU) admitted that nobody could confirm Halper’s wild stories about President Trump. “VMU notes there is no corroboration concerning MITCH’s reporting. Due to the singular nature of his or her access, VMU was unable to locate corroboration concerning MITCH’s reporting.” Mitch was Halper’s FBI informant code name.
Halper’s uncorroborated intel was “integral” to the Crossfire investigation. The FBI memo reported, “CHS (MITCH) was integral in an operation against the subject of a sensitive investigation.”
Snitching fake but useful stories wrapped in the glory of past government service is, apparently, a very lucrative side gig. Indeed, the FBI has paid Halper $1.2 million dollars of our money since 1991. The new records show Halper received an astonishing $70,000 from the FBI between August 2016 and the start of February 2017.
Not only that. In 2020, an investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) showed Halper got another million in sweet taxpayer bucks as a contractor for the “Office of Net Assessment” between 2012 and 2018. The Washington Examiner reported at the time that the ONA was “unable to provide sufficient documentation of whether Halper was doing the research work he’d been hired to do.”
Halper’s fattened himself off the federal feed trough. All that largesse from informant fees and sketchy ‘research contracts’ squats on top of Halper’s generous retirement pension from his federal government service and whatever Cambridge might still be paying him in royalties or retirement. Not to mention the opaque British Intelligence agencies. The US government is a financial bonanza for the bloated octogenarian storyteller. He’s in the club.
Halper should write a book called “Deep State Grifter: How to Get Rich Off Your Government Service.”
Somebody must figure out how to scrape off all these deep-state barnacles. They have a lucrative scam going, and nobody is invited except for club members.
They say pigs get fed but hogs get slaughtered. Well, Halper? You’ve been pretty hoggish.
🔥 I’ll end with this. Whether or not it was intentional, just as with the JFK disclosures, Trump strategically weaponized the Crossfire Hurricane declassification to expose —and injure— the deep state. He’s not just embarrassing specific offenders like Strzok or Halper; the President is systematically chipping away at institutional legitimacy and deep-state insulation from accountability.
We were never meant to see these documents. But the Crossfire Hurricane files—including the explosive Strzok text messages—aren’t merely transparency for transparency’s sake. They’re a black-op in reverse, a precision-guided strike against deep-state narratives, laying bare the bureaucratic abuses, political bias, and partisan conspiracies cloaked behind the curtain of “national security.”
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
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We had more good judicial news yesterday in the mass deportation wars. The New York Times ran a story headlined, “Pressuring Migrants to ‘Self-Deport,’ White House Moves to Cancel Social Security Numbers.” The sub-headline explained, “By placing migrants in Social Security’s ‘death master file,’ the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.”
In other words, you are dead to us.
White House spokeswoman Elizabeth Huston said the changes at Social Security would help advance the president’s immigration goals. “President Trump promised mass deportations, and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” she wrote in a statement. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”
DOGE has repurposed the Social Security “death master file” to function as a blacklist for people who should not be receiving government benefits. On Tuesday, DOGE workers sent the first batch of 6,300 names of migrant criminals and known terrorists who are currently getting US government benefits. Sixty three hundred of them.
The Times saw nothing good about it whatsoever, fretting instead that the campaign could expand and include other types of illegals.
🔥 Yesterday, the AP ran a story headlined, “Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward.” The story explained, “everyone in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation, in a move that could have far-reaching repercussions for immigrants across the country.”
The lawsuit started when the Trump Administration began to enforce a long-overlooked law called the Alien Registration Act of 1940. Also called the “Smith Act,” the law requires all non-citizen adult residents —age 14+ and in the US for more than 30 days— to register with the federal government, including providing detailed personal information, fingerprints, and political affiliation. Failure to comply carries criminal penalties and deportation.
The Smith Act has been sitting there, on the dusty books on the bottom shelf, unenforced for ages. It has been extensively challenged, especially by communist groups during the Cold War, and never been found unconstitutional. In Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952), for example, the Supreme Court upheld deportation of legal residents who were former Communist Party members, holding that deportations for political affiliation did not violate the First Amendment or due process rights.
One of the plaintiffs, the National Immigration Law Center, said the fact that Trump’s Homeland Security Agency is now enforcing the Act “forces people into an impossible choice.” The article didn’t bother to explain, but I will.
If illegals follow the law and register, then HHS instantly knows where to find them. So obviously, they don’t want to register. But it would still be their best choice. If they defy the law, and do not register, then HHS has another perfectly legal basis for deporting them— for violating the Smith Act.
Either way, the Trump administration has skillfully outmaneuvered immigration activists by leveraging existing laws. There’s nothing “impossible” or “unfair” here. It is just an inconvenient reality for those grown used to unenforced immigration statutes.
It’s classic Trump 2.0: dusting off an overlooked legal tool that was always back in the shed someplace, just waiting to be oiled up and used.
🔥 Finally, NBC ran another immigration story yesterday headlined, “Trump plans to fine migrants $998 a day for failing to leave after deportation order.” The sub-headline added, “The Trump administration plans to apply the penalties retroactively for up to five years, which could result in fines of more than $1 million.”
While I have much sympathy for otherwise law-abiding illegals who were induced to enter the US by Biden and his army of criminal NGOs, NBC’s narrative of a dark and sinister plan by the Trump Administration to “punish” illegal immigrants fell flat.
It’s the same story all over again. “The fines,” NBC said, “stem from a 1996 law that was enforced for the first time in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.” Another unenforced law! The apothegmatically-named Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 imposes civil penalties on noncitizens who willfully fail to comply with final removal orders. It provides a civil penalty of up to $998 per day for violators.
For Portland readers, that comes to around $360,000 per year.
The Trump Administration has also suggested the DOJ will deploy its asset forfeiture division to confiscate property (think bank accounts and real estate) of illegal aliens who defy their deportation dates.
Noticeably absent from the story was any acknowledgment of why these folks haven’t complied with their final deportation orders in the first place. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that immigrants in the U.S. illegally should use their CBP One app to “self-deport and leave the country now.”
These Administration moves —enforcing the daily fines of nearly a thousand bucks for ignoring deportation orders, combined with asset seizures, mandatory registration under the long-forgotten Alien Registration Act, and aggressive enforcement of existing immigration statutes— is steadily increasing the pressure on illegal migrants from all angles. If they don’t self-deport, they risk being sent to El Salvador’s brutal Super-Max prison— a Central American fortress known for housing violent gang members under extremely harsh conditions.
But it’s not just sticks. There are also carrots. The Administration has said over and over till it was hoarse that folks who voluntarily self-deport will get a chance to apply for legal residency or citizenship. They just need to exit and then do it the right way.
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Finally, Trump’s Cabinet held another open meeting yesterday where each cabinet member gave a report to the President (and to us taxpayers). The whole thing was great, but I’m short on time. Maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, there were two standouts that you’ll be especially excited about.
First, Tulsi Gabbard reported on election integrity. Of all places, MoneyControl reported the story headlined, “Gabbard backs paper ballots, claims voting machines vulnerable to hackers.”
Among other things, she reported, “We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time.” She added, “and vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the results of votes being cast.” She carefully didn’t say they had evidence the machines were hacked, but that wasn’t where she was going.
In short, they are building a case to delete the electronic voting machines in favor of paper ballots, “so that voters can have faith in the integrity of our elections.”
Tulsi Gabbard’s report was a direct shot across the electronic voting companies’ bow. Her clever framing —pointing out vulnerabilities without explicitly alleging fraud— is intended to construct a strong public case for switching back to secure, verifiable paper ballots. In other words, rebuilding transparency and voter confidence. Tulsi’s careful language shows strategic patience: first build consensus around machine vulnerability, then offer the clear solution (paper ballots).
In other words, she’s working on the future problem. That doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten about what happened. A few days ago, Trump separately ordered an investigation into Chris Krebs, the former CISA director who “certified” the 2020 election, for example.
He hasn’t forgotten.
💉 Next, Secretary Kennedy delivered a long report for HHS. That man is keeping himself busy. USA Today reported the absolutely astonishing story headlined, “RFK Jr. says the government will know what caused the ‘autism epidemic’ by September.”
In what might be the headline item for the entire cabinet meeting, Kennedy announced that we will have the answer to what is causing the epidemic of autism in five months. “We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”
CLIP: Robert Kennedy says we will have an autism answer by September (1:54).
“We will know by September,” Kennedy repeated. President Trump said, “there will be no bigger press conference.” Indeed. “There’s gotta be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” Trump insisted. “Maybe, it’s a shot,” he speculated, “but something’s causing it.”
Big Pharma is sweating buckets. The government has never asked this question before.
In fact, our massive health agencies have never cured a single disease. Never. If they end autism, not only will it be historic, but it will arguably be the greatest health accomplishment in human history, maybe since they figured out surgeons should wash their hands occasionally. And it would save millions of children from lifelong suffering.
Kennedy is smart. He’s a lawyer— a real lawyer. He knows that if he can’t deliver the goods by September, his credibility will be immediately shredded by the buzzsaw attachment to corporate media’s assassination machine.
It also won’t be some fuzzy unprovable claim that the media can obfuscate and deny. If Kennedy does figure it out, autism rates will go down. It’s that simple. That single accomplishment could define Trump’s presidency and cement his legacy. Give yourself multiple ways to win (Art of the Deal). And future medical books will include entire chapters on Robert Kennedy.
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” — Helen Keller.
Reject media doomspitting! So much good news is rolling through, I can’t even cover it all. Be of great cheer.
Have a fabulous Friday! And hustle back here tomorrow morning for more terrific, essential news and commentary.
Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
