In recent months, Donald Trump and some of his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill have seized on Peter Strzok—the senior F.B.I. agent who, in 2016, led the Bureau’s investigations of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail practices and of Russian interference in the Presidential election—as if he represented some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for the President.

Practically every day, Trump attacks Strzok on Twitter, depicting his role in the Russia probe as proof it was a “Witch Hunt” from the get-go. Last week, Republican officials from the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee questioned Strzok—pronounced “Struck”—for more than eleven hours in a private session. And on Thursday, the Republican members of the two committees sought to put him on the griddle before the cameras in a joint hearing, only to discover that messing with G-men can be dangerous. It was they and their President who got burned.

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On the face of things, Strzok was in an invidious position: having to defend a series of text messages he sent to the woman with whom he was having an affair—Lisa Page, an F.B.I. attorney at the time—in which he repeatedly bemoaned the prospect of a Trump victory and vowed it wouldn’t happen. After Trump took office, Strzok had been part of the team run by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, investigating Russian interference in the election—but he was reassigned after Mueller found out about the texts. Trump and the Republicans have been crowing about these messages for months, and the South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, the first Republican to get a crack at Strzok on Thursday, went straight to one from July 21, 2016, in which Strzok said, “Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his presidency would be.”

Strzok was far from fazed, however. With his close-cut hair, sharp features, and self-confident bearing, he looked like Hollywood’s idea of a senior F.B.I. agent, and he seemed delighted to have his say in public. In his opening statement, which he read out slowly, in a firm voice, he had already effectively demolished the Republican theory of the case: that he was out to get Trump, and prevent him from becoming President. “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,” Strzok said. “This information had the potential to derail and, quite possibly, defeat Mr. Trump. But the thought of exposing that information never crossed my mind.”

Not content with undermining the logic of his inquisitors, Strzok also dared to question their motivation, and even their patriotism, saying, “I understand we are living in a political era in which insults and insinuation often drown out honesty and integrity, but the honest truth is that Russian interference in our elections constitutes a grave attack on our democracy.” The Russian attack had been “wildly successful—sowing discord in our nation and shaking faith in our institutions,” Strzok continued. “I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”

If this were a boxing match, the referee might well have declared a T.K.O. then and there. But Gowdy got his opportunity to land some blows, and he eventually focussed in on a late-night text exchange from August 8, 2016, in which Lisa Page wrote to Strzok, “Trump’s never going to become president, right?” Strzok replied, “No. No. He’s not. We’ll stop it.”

Many of Trump’s supporters have seized on this message as a smoking gun. In the private hearing, Strzok testified that the “We’ll” referred to the American people, not the F.B.I. As Gowdy questioned him, he repeatedly said the text needed to be presented in its proper context. Gowdy, who is an experienced tormentor of Democratic witnesses, declined to give him a chance to make such a presentation. But after a noisy intervention by the Democratic congressman David Cicilline, Bob Goodlatte, the head of the Judiciary Committee, who was chairing the hearing, made the fateful decision to grant Strzok more time.

The text didn’t come out of the blue, Strzok explained. It was written late at night, “off the cuff, and in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based upon that horrible, disgusting behavior, that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be the President of the United States.”

Strzok was referring here to Trump’s dismissive statements, on July 31, 2016, about Ghazala Khan, the mother of Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American soldier who was killed by a car bomb in Iraq, in 2004. At the time, even some Republicans balked at Trump’s offensive comments. The text “was in no way, unequivocally, any suggestion that me, the F.B.I., would take any action whatsoever to improperly impact the electoral process, for any candidate,” Strzok went on. Addressing Gowdy directly, he added, “So I take great offense and I take great disagreement to your assertion of what that was or wasn’t.”

Strzok then turned his attention back to Goodlatte. His voice rising, he delivered a statement that may have been prepared but also appeared to come from somewhere deep inside him. It is worth quoting in full:

I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, at no time in any of these texts did those personal beliefs ever enter into the realm of any action I took. Furthermore, this isn’t just me sitting here telling you. You don’t have to take my word for it. At every step, at every investigative decision, there are multiple layers of people above me—the assistant director, executive assistant director, deputy director, and director of the F.B.I.—and multiple layers of people below me—section chiefs, supervisors, unit chiefs, case agents, and analysts—all of whom were involved in all of these decisions.

They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them. That is who we are as the F.B.I. And the suggestion that I, in some dark chamber somewhere in the F.B.I., would somehow cast aside all of these procedures, all of these safeguards, and somehow be able to do this is astounding to me. It simply couldn’t happen. And the proposition that is going on, that it might occur anywhere in the F.B.I., deeply corrodes what the F.B.I. is in American society, the effectiveness of their mission, and it is deeply destructive.”

As Strzok spoke, Gowdy leaned back in his chair, a cold look on his face. What was he thinking? He hasn’t served entirely as a White House patsy on the Russia affair. At one point, he suggested that Trump should start acting more like he is innocent. But Gowdy and other House Republicans invested what was left of their credibility in a conspiracy theory that was now blowing up in their faces, live on television. After Strzok said the words “deeply destructive,” there was a brief silence in the hearing room. Then there was a round of applause from the public gallery.