A week ago it was reported that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz would finally be releasing his report on how Obama-era leaders at the department and the FBI badly botched their 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton’s serious mishandling of sensitive government emails when she was secretary of state. But it seems that once the release date became public, deep state actors and the Trump-hating media went to work.

A strategic leaker fed an unverified rumor to the media Wednesday about President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to distract the public from focusing on the highly inflammatory and damning IG’s report that was issued Thursday. This political tactic is used routinely, but Americans are smart enough to recognize that is was part of the left’s coordinated witch hunt to take down President Trump.

Now that the IG report has been made public, the American people can see the truth for themselves. The truth is that certain high-level bad actors in the FBI wanted desperately to stop candidate Donald Trump from becoming president of the United States.

One new text message disclosed in Horowitz’s report is a smoking gun. On August 8, 2016, FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were romantically involved, exchanged a text that confirmed our worst nightmares.

“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok.

“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

Think about that. Let those words sink in for a moment.

This text exchange shows beyond any doubt that unelected bureaucrats wanted to use their immensely powerful investigative authority to actively try to subvert the will of the people about who should become the next president of the United States. This is high-level government corruption and a direct threat to democracy.

No wonder those on the Trump-hating left are doing everything they can to muddy the water. They don’t want the American people to realize that Trump-haters in the deep state were making politically motivated investigative decisions to try to stop a presidential candidate who they opposed.

Strzok and Page’s cover story for the newly disclosed text doesn’t pass muster and is absurd on its face. The new report says they told IG Horowitz that if they truly wanted to effect the presidential election, they wouldn’t have kept the Russia investigation confidential and out of the public domain.

The facts tell a different story. CNN reported on August 19, 2016 – 11 days after the texts in question – that “FBI and Justice Department prosecutors are conducting an investigation into possible US ties to alleged corruption of the former pro-Russian president of Ukraine, including the work of Paul Manafort's firm, according to multiple US law enforcement officials.”

One can’t help but wonder about the source or sources of this investigative report. Manafort resigned as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign on the same day the CNN’s report came out. So any negative news about Manafort was clearly designed to hurt Donald Trump, even though there was absolutely no connection between Trump and Manafort’s work on behalf of Ukraine.

Here’s the bottom line: Peter Strzok was intimately involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. He then went to work for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 president election. Strzok was also one of the agents present at then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s interview with the FBI.

How can the American people possibly come to a conclusion that these investigations aren’t corrupted by politics?

Horowitz also disclosed that another FBI attorney who worked on both the Clinton and Russia investigations “left” the Mueller team earlier this year, after politically biased instant messages were discovered.

One of the shocking messages from that attorney seemed to allude to the anti-Trump effort, stating: “Viva le Resistance.” Even highly motivated political operatives inside the FBI failed to produce any evidence pointing to collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign, validating President Trump’s frequent statement of fact: “There was no collusion.”

Indeed, the report found ample evidence of strong pro-Clinton and anti-Trump political bias inside the FBI. IG Horowitz was troubled enough by the behavior of some FBI employees assigned to the Hillary Clinton email investigation that his report concluded that they “cast a cloud” over the probe and “sowed doubt the FBI’s work on, and its handling of” the investigation.

The inspector general referred five FBI employees to the FBI to determine whether their actions violate “the FBI’s Offense Code of Conduct.”

The Horowitz report is extremely troubling and needs to be thoroughly dissected. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray need to take this report to heart and get their houses in order. They should start by firing Peter Strzok.