Peter Strzok, the central figure in both the FBI’s burying of Hillary Clinton’s crimes and in carrying out the “insurance policy” of his lover, Lisa Page, to use the powers of the national security establishment to take out a U.S. presidential candidate, is strolling back in to FBI Headquarters these days as though it was just another day at the office.

I am not making this up.

“Strzok is in the (HQ) building all the time,” one FBI insider revealed, according to a recent media report at True Pundit. “He is taking meetings or part of meetings.” The article goes on, “FBI sources confirm Strzok has been granted access to FBI facilities in Washington, D.C. and its headquarters building on numerous occasions since he was sacked in August 2018.”

Strzok is the man who emphatically told former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that they would “stop” Mr. Trump from winning the 2016 election. And they would do that using a fraudulently predicated counterintelligence investigation based on “evidence” planted by one of their own assets, Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious Maltese professor widely linked to Western intelligence services, on a hapless Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos.

Yet now we learn that not only is Strzok being permitted back into FBI Headquarters (perhaps as a paid contractor?), but he still holds his security clearances. “He (Strzok) is getting in with a visitor’s badge and is involved in meetings,” one FBI insider said. The same article notes, “Maybe they are all trying to get their story straight before things go public.” Moreover, it continues, “FBI sources said when Strzok is not at the Hoover building he has been holding meetings with high-level DOJ brass at a location across the street from the Bureau’s Pennsylvania Avenue base.”

Not wanting to rely solely on the word of a pseudonymously written True Pundit report, I did some rooting around and discovered not only that the True Pundit story is accurate, but obtained some additional information about Strzok.

My source is a retired FBI agent with current contacts within FBI Headquarters. This person tells me:

"True Pundit’s information about the visitor badges for Strzok came from one of my most reliable sources. There is no reason for him to be in that building. If he is cooperating, he’d be at Main Justice or at the US Attorney’s office. He has been seen several times over several months inside FBIHQ. His clearances are simply suspended upon leaving the FBI. If he got a job tomorrow requiring a clearance, that entity would have to take over responsibility for his clearances. Unless he’s working for someone who did that, then his clearances are suspended. I can tell you the initial report of him being seen in FBIHQ on a few occasions with a visitor badge and being escorted is true from my source inside FBIHQ."

The fact that Strzok’s security clearances are merely “suspended” and eligible for reactivation is stunning. A security clearance is a very valuable commodity in Washington, D.C. The man whom the DoJ Inspector General found to be a grossly biased federal investigator and was sacked accordingly is allowed to maintain those clearances. Amazing.

Donald Trump's presidency has revealed that our country is in the grip of an entrenched bureaucracy whose hold, I am of the increasing opinion, may take decades to break. This anecdote about Peter Strzok’s continued security clearances and access to a building that President Trump nominally controls illustrates the vicelike grasp that “Deep State” players continue to hold over our government. Presidents come and go, but the powerful, embedded apparatchiks remain, and protect their own.

Despite being fired by the FBI for demonstrating gross bias in his text messages with Page while being a central figure in both the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s gross abuse of national security information, and then helping to conduct the effort to derail President Trump’s candidacy and then presidency through his participation in the Mueller “Russia-Trump” collusion faux investigation/coup plot, Strzok waltzes in and out of FBI HQ as though he’d never left.

And as if to stick its finger in the eye of those of us who express such concerns, some geniuses in the bowels of the FBI Intelligence Division have, for the first time, identified “fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terror threat,” according to reporting from Phoenix New Times, citing Yahoo News. 

The article quotes former FBI Special Agent Michael German, who expresses concern over the FBI’s basing surveillance activities on perceived conspiracy-theory followers. “The danger of this Phoenix FBI report, he said, is that it targets ideas and creates avenues for monitoring them instead of targeting potential violence.”

So let me get this straight. The FBI, which has now provably been shown to be at the heart of the most egregious actual conspiracy in our nation’s history -- an effort to subvert a Republican presidential candidate and then President, through phony investigations and manufactured crimes -- is going to label those of us who wonder what other kinds of conspiracies may be afoot as domestic terror threats. 

This is why I say, figuratively speaking, that our country needs five terms of Donald Trump. President Trump of course is limited to two terms as president under the Twenty-Second Amendment, but if we are to break the incredible power of the Christopher Wray-types that populate the upper echelons of our government, we will need successor presidents with the same dogged mindset as President Trump to bring rogue agencies like the FBI to heel. It may take twenty years -- a generation.

In 2016 most Americans understood vaguely the notion that there was a Deep State controlling our government. The term Deep State, apparently first coined by Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, very effectively captured the sense that there is an indefinable monolith controlling our government for the purpose of ensuring its own preservation, power and growth.

But many of us knew what was going on at a visceral level. We knew that our individual sovereignty was being subsumed by something beyond our control, that risked overturning what our Founders sought to create and ensuring exactly what they most feared -- an all-powerful federal government no longer answerable to its own constituents. It frightened us.

Donald Trump also recognized it and did something extraordinary. He risked a lifetime of accomplishment and billions of dollars in accumulated wealth for us. He placed his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor on the line to break the grip of the Deep State.

All of us who voted for Trump knew that an historic national reset was in order. Hillary Clinton represented an irredeemable paralysis that would have set in following the socialist agenda that Barack Obama had set us upon.

We will not get five terms of Donald Trump, and would not want that, as effective an executive as he has been. But we will need a series of presidents with President Trump’s attitude, who will bring agencies that act as fiefdoms unto their own once again under the control of the President whom we elect. Otherwise, that Revolution 243 years ago will have been for naught.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)