Via Breitbart, we’ll have to wait for the IG’s report on Russiagate to know for sure, won’t we? Maher’s take is certainly possible. Strzok wouldn’t be the first or last guy to reassure his girlfriend that he’ll protect her from the bad guys with no intention of actually doing anything about it. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head, darlin’. Strzok-y’s here.”

But the “virtual pillow talk” theory is somewhat harder to entertain in context. And there’s a lot of context:

I’ve mentioned the following passage from the DOJ report in half a dozen posts by now but it really can’t be stressed enough. The IG explicitly considered a scenario in which Strzok slow-walked the investigation into Anthony Weiner’s laptop because he was leery of doing something to hurt Hillary’s chances in the final weeks of the campaign. Strzok denied it, the IG couldn’t prove it, but Strzok’s bias against Trump was so amply supported by the evidence that the IG just couldn’t dismiss the possibility. That is to say, the authority on this matter, who spent months examining Strzok’s behavior, believes it’s perfectly plausible that Strzok really did let politics steer his investigative decisions.

Maher’s theory is strange when you consider that he’s as strongly anti-Trump as Strzok was, if not more so. Democrats have spent the last three days zeroed in on two topics that contradict each other to some extent: (1) Trump’s child-separation policy at the border is a fascist atrocity and indelible stain on America, and (2) there’s no evidence that Peter Strzok let his antipathy to the perpetrator of these fascist atrocities guide his actions during the Emailgate investigation. Er, by the left’s logic, shouldn’t he have? What would a member of the hashtag-Resistance have done in Strzok’s shoes? If you were an FBI agent convinced that Trump is a creature from the Book of Revelation, spawned by hell to wreck American democracy, and you were forced to decide in the home stretch of the campaign whether to pursue a damaging new lead against Hillary Clinton, what would you have done? What would Special Agent Bill Maher have done? Given the level of Maher-like alarm at Trump evinced by Strzok in his chats with Page, it’d be weird if he didn’t let his biases corrupt the investigation. Which is exactly why the IG is suspicious of his motives.