A Republican senator disagreed with people from his own party who’ve said special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is completely compromised because of anti-President Trump texts sent by one agent involved.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” Sunday the investigation isn’t totally tainted because one agent — kicked off of the probe in July — sent texts critical of Trump in 2016.
“What they have to determine was he directing the investigation one way or the other while he was on the investigation, is that something they can repair and look and see if there’s any bias,” he said.
“Obviously I don’t think it taints the entire process but certainly taints that season of it, something should look at with any political investigation that he was on. We want our FBI agents to be neutral to be nonpolitical, not very actively engaged politically.”
The texts — sent by then-senior counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok to Lisa Page, another FBI agent with whom he was having an affair — criticized Trump heartily and even made mention of some sort of “insurance policy” in case he was elected.
When the texts were discovered in the summer, Strzok was kicked off the investigation and moved to the FBI’s human resources division.
Lankford said the obvious political bias from Strzok is an issue, but he trusted Mueller to deal with it appropriately.
“It’s clear this individual within the Mueller team that was also on the Clinton email investigation team on the FBI, in their leadership had a strong bias against now President Trump when he was candidate trump and was very clear about that,” he said. “When that was discovered by the Mueller team, they fired him, promptly so, took him off of that team. But, that is a big consideration. We expect the Justice Department to be blind and be fair to all sides not have a clear political bias and express it so strongly.”
