Dem rep: FBI officials’ texts don’t prove they were biased

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said on Thursday that text messages between two FBI agents criticizing President Trump do not demonstrate a biased federal probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election meddling.

“It doesn’t show a biased investigation,” Nadler told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “New Day.” 

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“First of all, she [Lisa Page] and [Peter] Strzok were sending emails back and forth with their personal opinions and the opinions they were stating in those emails were the same opinions of the majority of the American people. They didn’t like Trump, they didn’t trust him, whatever, and they’re entitled to those opinions,” he said. 

“The question you have to ask is, ‘is the investigation biased,’ not, ‘what are the personal opinions of some of the people who work on the investigation?'”

Strzok and Page were having an extramarital affair at the time of the texts and served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election meddling for a brief period before they were removed over the texts.

Republicans have seized upon the text messages as evidence that the investigation is stacked against Trump, and have publicly questioned if the FBI is at the center of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

However, Democrats have countered that Republicans have selectively leaked the messages in a misleading manner and that the agents’ personal opinions do not play a role in their jobs at the FBI.