The texting FBI agents are guilty ... of flirting

One of the recent prolonged obsessions of Donald Trump is the text messages exchanged in 2016 between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his then-lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. In a Jan. 11 interview, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he believed Strzok’s texts, sent in September 2016 while Strzok was investigating links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, constituted “treason.”

Trump’s assertions appear to be quite a stretch, according to a new report in the WSJ, which reviewed the 7,000 messages. While Strzok expressed his strong distaste for the Russian operatives and sometimes criticized Trump (“Trump is a fucking idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer,” he said in one message), those comments “represented a fraction” of all the messages exchanged — hardly the grand, alleged anti-Trump conspiracy that Republican senators previously called “jaw-dropping.”

Mostly, they discussed what their lives were like at the FBI and talked about each other.

“You see the future. You assimilate and combine things in am [sic] uncanny way,” Strzok said in one message to Page. “And hey. Congrats on a woman nominated for President in a major party! About damn time! Many many more returns of the day!!” Strzok said in another, to which Page replied “That’s cute. Thanks.”

Read more: Here's what's in the memo Trump just released

Trump’s fixation with Strzok is directly related to the FBI agent’s previous role on the team conducting special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation of Trumpworld. After Strzok’s messages critical of Trump were discovered, he was reassigned from the investigation in July 2017 to a role in human resources at the Bureau.

Strzok also surfaces in the infamous memo released by House Intelligence Committee Republicans on Friday, which claims that Strzok and Page “both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated.” The memo has been castigated by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Congressional Democrats as a partisan interpretation of the facts that prompted the summer 2016 FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign, which Strzok led.

Ironically, it appears that Strzok, a counterintelligence specialist, was one of the FBI agents spearheading the agency’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Strzok “aggressively” pursued the Clinton case, according to CNN, and even co-wrote the first draft of a controversial letter from former FBI Director James Comey, which reopened the Clinton email investigation days before the 2016 election.

Cover: Pedestrians walk past FBI headquarters in Washington, Friday, Feb. 2, 2018. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg via Getty Images)