I also had to eventually turn away. The shenanigans intended to disrupt contentious hearings of this nature are nothing new. You have to see some of the TV footage from Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy's 1954 Army-McCarthy senate hearings and the 3-ring circus those hearings became. Pandering to the cameras and constituencies was rampant.
Trey Gowdy questioning someone is a master at work. There wasn't much new in what I saw that hasn't already been in the press or on the news, if one scans for crumbs of facts around the highly biased news reports. The transcript of the closed-door deposition(s) may be more beneficial. I found absolutely abhorrent and despicable Steve Cohen's (D-Tenn.) remark that Strzok deserved a Purple Heart for his treatment by the committee's aggressive interrogation. That was an egregious insult to the US Armed Forces and in particular, every service member who has received one. Cohen never served a single day in the US Armed Forces making his remark even worse.
That said . . .
Strzok brought the firestorm upon himself with his voluminous Trump-hating communications with his adulterous lover. I don't have much sympathy for him. I am amazed he retained a TS/SCI security clearance as long as he did after his adulterous relationship came to light. It's one of the clearly enumerated causes for revoking one. TS/SCI: Top Secret clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. Examples of other causes are high levels of indebtedness, excessive (legal) gambling, heavy alcohol use, romantic relationship or marriage with a foreign national, and consorting with prostitutes (prostitution is legal in some foreign countries). In a previous life I had to restrict access pending revocation, never a pleasant task. Reason for doing this is someone having something about their life that could be used as leverage by enemy intelligence services to exploit or extort classified information from them. Some investigation of the other party in a serious romantic relationship and a spouse is common as that's another path to potentially extorting classified information. I personally witnessed a clearance temporarily restricted and downgraded after a soldier married a German national during the Cold War until her background was thoroughly investigated. Homosexuality used to be cause for revocation, but today it's a "so what".
Note about SCI Access:
SCI access requires a Top Secret clearance as a prerequisite. The SCI grants access on a need to know basis to the most sensitive of classified information, much of it intelligence related. It is considered so sensitive that information sets are compartmentalized to prevent one person from having knowledge of an entire related set: access to one "compartment" of it precludes access to any other "compartment". Such a clearance requires the most extensive of background investigations, a SSBI, which can easily require over a year to accomplish.
John
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