Other Peter Strzok text messages, per Rachel Maddow.

This won't shut up the GOP but it would be great if it helped shut them down. 

Much-maligned FBI agent Peter Strzok (pronounced: Struck) was trotted before the House of Representatives yesterday as a sacrificial lamb in the GOP's and Pres. Trump's attempts to accuse the opposition (hard-working Americans, basically) of its own crimes. In this alternative reality, the narrative of which gets aired daily on Fox News and the like, the FBI, in the person of James Comey, didn't help Trump win the 2016 election; the Bureau actively tried stopping him. Exhibit A is Strzok, who, in private text messages with an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an affair, slammed Trump during the 2016 campaign. Here, for example, is one from July 21:

“Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his presidency would be.”

More prescient than anything. The one the GOP likes to wring its hands over is from a few weeks later:

Lisa Page: Trump's never going to become president, right?
Strzok: No. No. He's not. We‘ll stop it.

OMG! A smoking gun!

Not so fast, says Strzok. The “we,” he’s said constantly, is not the FBI but the American people. Who, sadly, were not up to the task Strzok gave them. We stopped shit. 

Anyway, in the hearing yesterday, Strzok didn't stop there. Not nearly. He laid out the apparently revolutionary idea, to Republicans, that one can still be a professional even though one has political opinions. Unlike the GOP, and folks like Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), he puts the professional before the political:

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.

Cf., my review of “The Post.” Also see the above image. Strzok not only didn't like Trump; he didn't think much of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Loretta Lynch. He was like much of America in 2016 in this regard. 

The New Yorker's John Cassidy has a nice piece on Strzok's testimony, and ends it this way:

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.

Great ending. But you know the GOP. They simply ignored reality and shopped its narrative to the usual suspects. They have way too much invested in this.

What a sad side they've chosen.