By Ashe O
Washington, Aug 29 (IANS): Former FBI official Peter Strzok claims "any competent foreign intelligence service" would have tried to break into former US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence concerned over the storage of "classified documents" of the White House.
Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba are possible countries that these agents came from, he said.
Strzok, who was once Deputy Director of the FBI's counterintelligence division made the observation while speaking to MSNBC host Katie Phang on Sunday, the Business Insider reported. Fired from the agency for sending anti-Trump text messages on his work phone, Trump has frequently attacked him and claimed he is an example of state employees being biased against him.
Strzok was asked if Russia had "tried to infiltrate" Mar-a-Lago to obtain classified data, in an obvious reference to the classified documents that Trump had stored at his Florida home, which were seized during the FBI's raid on the property earlier this month.
"Absolutely the Russians, but not just the Russians, any competent foreign intelligence service, whether that's those belonging to China, those belonging to Iran, to Cuba, certainly including Russia, are all - were interested, and are interested in gaining access to Mar-a-Lago," he responded.
Strzok added that he found it "especially concerning" that there had been an "absolute lack of any sort of control or memorialisation of who had access to Mar-a-Lago at any given time". Whether or not classified documents had been kept on the property, it was still likely that foreign intelligence services would have attempted to gain access into Mar-a-Lago both during and after Trump's term as President, he said.
"And that's absolutely the sort of thing that the US intelligence community and the FBI, in particular, are going to be concerned about - trying to establish who had access to the grounds, who had access to that storage area, and what they need to do to mitigate any sort of damage that might've occurred," he added.
Strzok is known for having helped launch the investigation into whether there was Russian interference in the 2016 election.