President Trump lashed out on Friday at two FBI officials who exchanged text messages criticizing him during the 2016 campaign, declaring it “doesn’t get any lower than that.”
In a tweet, the president seized on a pair of text messages disclosed in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general on Thursday, in which one of the agents, Peter Strzok, suggests that they will “stop” Trump from becoming president.
“FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who headed the Clinton & Russia investigations, texted to his lover Lisa Page, in the IG Report, that ‘we’ll stop’ candidate Trump from becoming President,” Trump tweeted. “Doesn’t get any lower than that!”
{mosads}
The tweet followed the release of an inspector general’s report on the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
Many of the text messages between Strzok and the other official, Lisa Page, had been previously released. But the report unveils a previously undisclosed exchange.
In one of the messages, Page writes: Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
“No he won’t,” Strzok writes in response. “We’ll stop it.”
Nevertheless, the inspector general’s report does not conclude that political bias at the FBI directly affected the outcome of the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. The inspector general did suggest that the agents’ views cast a “cloud” over the probe.
Page has left the FBI and Strzok was reassigned to human resources. Both officials were involved at various times in the bureau’s Clinton investigation and the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Page left the Russia investigation not long after special counsel Robert Mueller took charge, and Strzok was reassigned last summer after Mueller became aware of his text message exchanges with Page.