Bill Maher Questions Peter Strzok on Trump-Russia Investigation: ‘Why Did You Say There Was No There There?’

Bill Maher, returning to air with a limited audience and a socially-distanced panel Friday night, spoke with former FBI agent Peter Strzok and asked him about the Trump-Russia investigation.

He agreed that “you had to look into him” but asked Strzok about how “it seems to me your view is that there was not something that happened there”:

“You said in a private text, so we know it was real, you said, ‘My gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there’… The New York Times had a big story in 2017 right after Trump was inaugurated. ‘Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,’ was the headline, and you said ‘We have not seen evidence’ of any of that. You said, ‘We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.’ That confuses me.”

He brought up the Trump Tower meeting and Paul Manafort’s contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik before asking, “Why did you say there was no there there?”

Strzok said, regarding the Times report, they were trying to figure out who was talking to the press, because some details were wrong and some were right.

He told Maher in that statement he was talking about someone like a “full-fledged foreign intelligence officer, not somebody who might be working with them, and that’s the kind of person we saw all over the Trump campaign.”

“Person after person after person in the Trump campaign had these undisclosed contacts with the Russians taht they started and continued not telling the truth about,” Strokz said, telling Maher he meant “I don’t think Trump is sitting like a mastermind on top of all these contacts controlling and coordinating what’s going on. What I thought was there are a bunch of grifters, opportunists, people trying to make money all sort of individually pursuing their agendas in a way that made them vulnerable to Russian intelligence.”

“I think you’re right. He’s definitely not a mastermind,” Maher said.

You can watch above, via HBO.