The Department of Justice just officially killed one of Trump’s favorite Trump-Russia defenses

Another one of Donald Trump’s fabricated defenses against the Russia investigation has come crumbling down.

For some time now, the president has been trying to paint the FBI as a corrupt, anti-Trump organization working to undermine first his campaign, and then his presidency. In particular, he focused on text messages exchanged by FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in which they criticized Trump as well as a handful of Democrats.

Strzok and Page were part of the investigation into Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails and went on to work for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation until they were removed from it by Mueller because of the uncovered texts. Trump in turn seized on their texts in order to make it seem like they abused their FBI powers to hurt him despite the lack of evidence to back up such a claim.

Now, we know the truth. The Justice Department’s ethics watchdog has announced that they’ve found no evidence indicating that the political opinions of Strzok and Page had an effect on the FBI’s investigations but that it did “cast a cloud” over the proceedings. Bloomberg reported on the findings.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed,” said Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. But he added, “the conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation.”

Right-wing pundits and Trump fans have been ranting about Strzok and Page since the original texts were revealed. It’s one of their favorite talking points so now they’ll have to scramble to find some new way to impugn the FBI and defend their incompetent leader.

With these revelations, Trump’s situation has grown more desperate. His efforts to smear the FBI have failed, and soon enough Robert Mueller will reveal everything he’s uncovered about the president and his crooked cronies. Hopefully, then we’ll finally be able to get this monster out of the White House.

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.