Strzok told investigators that he did “not mean to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation,” and the IG itself concluded that no such impact had been found. He testified at last month’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he had written the text “late at night” in response to Trump’s “horrible, disgusting” attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of the fallen Army Captain Humayun Khan. Trump had attacked the gold-star parents, who are Muslim, after they had appeared at the Democratic National Convention and denounced Trump for his call to ban Muslims from the United States.

Strzok also made the fundamental point at the hearing that had he wanted to derail Trump’s presidency, he could have leaked the existence of the Russia investigation. “There is … one extraordinarily important piece of evidence supporting my integrity, the integrity of the FBI, and our lack of bias,” he said in his statement at the start of what became an 11-hour hearing, defending himself like a man who had nothing left to lose. “In the summer of 2016, I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign. This information had the potential to derail and quite possibly defeat Mr. Trump, but the thought of expressing that or exposing that information never crossed my mind.”

Later, Strzok reiterated that the information the bureau had “which was alleging a Russian offer of assistance to a member of the Trump campaign was of extraordinary significance. It was credible. It was from an extraordinarily sensitive and credible source.”

The Former FBI special agent Frank Montoya Jr., who served as the director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive until 2016, acknowledged that Strzok “made a serious mistake” in exchanging those highly opinionated texts with Page. “But it wasn’t a fireable mistake,” he said. “Guys in the bureau get DUI’s and they get 30 days on the bricks. This is a case of the senior leadership in the bureau bending the knee and kissing the ring, while kowtowing to the wishes of the president.” If the decision was meant to appease Trump, it hasn’t worked—Trump continued to characterize the DOJ and the FBI as “corrupt” into Thursday.

Montoya also questioned why there haven’t been similar calls to investigate the concerns expressed by various high-ranking Justice Department and FBI officials in the run-up to the election that employees in the FBI’s New York field office, who opposed Clinton, would leak new information about her emails to the press. These concerns were outlined in the inspector general’s report, and confirmed by Strzok during his hearing. “I was aware of some people expressing that concern,” Strzok said. One of those people, he said, was former FBI Director James Comey, who publicly reopened the Clinton email probe just days before the election, while keeping the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign quiet.