An FBI employee who texted with her in-house lover about blocking Donald Trump's presidential ambitions wrote in 2016 of a 'quid pro quo' with the State Department to hide the fact that an email found on Hillary Clinton's home-brew email server was considered classified.

Lisa Page fretted in the closing days of the presidential campaign about a pending Freedom of Information Act disclosure of a discussion between top State and Justice Department officials about the potential trade.

Under the arrangement, the State Department would have given the FBI more legal attachés for its overseas division in exchange for altering the basis for keeping one of the Clinton emails from the public.

At the time, the email in question was exempt from FOIA requests because it was classified – a fact that was ultimately made public. The FBI had asked the State Department to 'change the basis of the FOIA withhold [decision] ... from classified to something else.'

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned her colleagues in late 2016 about a potentially embarrassing deal proposal that would have seen the State Department give the Bureau more liaison staff in exchange for changing the reason a classified Hillary Clinton email was withheld from the public

Page wrote to her colleagues less than a month before the 2016 election, including her then-lover Peter Strzok

Hillary Clinton, the the Democratic nominee for president, was in the middle of a pre-election scandal over classified material found on a home-brew private email server she used exclusively as secretary of state

The plot was never consummated. But Page, an FBI lawyer, was worried enough about it at the time to alert her colleagues that other employees had told investigators about it.

One of those colleagues was Peter Strzok, the married FBI agent she was having an affair with.

'Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s [witness interview reports] of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation,' Page warned.

'These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week.'

'As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in the FBI's International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else.'

The email came to light on Monday as part of a raft of material released by Judicial Watch, a conservative government transparency group whose standard practice is to sue government agencies that slow-walk the disclosure of public records.

Page and Strzok became poster children in 2017 for conservatives' claims that the Burean was biased against Trump and took actions to tilt the election in Clinton's favor despite the national security threats posed by classified material found on her unsecured private email server.

Strzok was an FBI agent tasked to Robert Mueller's Russia probe until he was let go following public exposure of his texts with Page, in which they chatted about keeping Trump from winning the White House

Page was an attorney for the FBI at the time she wrote the 2016 emails

Clinton ultimately lost the presidency amid Trump campaign-trail cries to 'lock her up' over the national security breach posed by housing classified documents on an unsecured private server in the basement of her upstate New York house

Text messages between the pair, both of whom worked on Special Counsel Robert Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, have given Republicans ample fodder to question the ongoing investigation.

Strzok was a respected, veteran counterintelligence agent who helped lead the 2016 probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. That operation ultimately cleared her despite the presence of classified material among her messages and a conclusion that some of that material was accessed by foreign agents.

Strzok was removed from the Russia probe in the summer of 2017 after the Justice Department found out about the texts.

The furtive messages between him and Page included observations about the 2016 election and criticism of Trump using words like 'idiot,' 'loathsome,' 'menace' and 'disaster.'

In one August 2016 exchange, Page wrote Strzok: '(Trump's) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!'

Strzok responded: 'No. No he won't. We'll stop it.'

The couple also discussed an unnamed 'insurance policy' against Trump's White House ambitions.

A DOJ inspector general report released Thursday found that exchange 'is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate's electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.'