The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website July 12, 2018:
To hear President Trump tell it, FBI agent Peter Strzok was hopelessly biased against him and his candidacy. Trump has tweeted criticisms of Strzok repeatedly, often in personally disparaging terms, and on at least two occasions has suggested that Strzok’s involvement in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election had a specific goal: preventing him from becoming president.
Strzok was a central player in the dueling investigations during the 2016 campaign. He was involved in the initial investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and opened the investigation into possible connections between Trump’s campaign and the Russian effort to influence the election’s outcome. He was subsequently involved in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s continuation of that investigation until Mueller learned of texts Strzok sent to Lisa Page, another FBI employee with whom the agent was engaged in an extramarital relationship. Those texts included some disparaging Trump in stark terms, prompting Mueller to remove him from the effort last July.
Trump has highlighted those texts as evidence that the investigation into him is biased for months. The president retweeted a particularly significant one last month.
View the complete article on the Washington Post website here.