WASHINGTON -- The former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller's team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging President Donald Trump and supporting Hillary Clinton, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Peter Strzok, as deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, was a key player in the investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server to do government work while she was secretary of state, as well as the probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.
During the Clinton investigation, Strzok was involved in a romantic relationship with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The extramarital affair was problematic, these people said, but of greater concern among senior law enforcement officials were text messages the two exchanged during the Clinton investigation and campaign season, in which they expressed anti-Trump sentiments and other comments that appeared to favor Clinton.
The people discussing the matter did not further describe the political messages between Strzok and Page, except to say the two would sometimes react to campaign news of the moment.
The Justice Department inspector general's office said in a statement Saturday that its investigators are "reviewing allegations involving communications between certain individuals, and will report its findings regarding those allegations promptly upon completion of the review of them."
A spokesman for Mueller's office said Strzok was removed "immediately upon learning of the allegations," and that Page left the Mueller team two weeks before the team became aware of the allegations.
The FBI declined to comment.
Strzok and Page have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Defenders of Page and Strzok insisted that the issue is "overblown" and that there was no misconduct between the two.
A friend of Page said there was no professional misconduct at issue in the matter, and she said Page left the Mueller team in July before any of the issues came to light.
Page also no longer works much with McCabe, these people said.
When the issue arose, Strzok was taken off the Mueller team in late July, and he was given a job in the human resources division of the FBI -- widely viewed internally as a demotion, according to people familiar with the matter.
A former senior Trump administration official said Strzok was even-handed in all of his dealing with the Trump White House. "I had the occasion to work closely with Special Agent Peter Strzok and never experienced even a hint of political bias. He was one of the most competent [counterintelligence] agents, and a role model," the official said. "The country is tearing itself apart, and men like Pete Strzok are victims. The enemy is better off with him sidelined."
At the time they left Mueller's group, no one publicly linked the two departures. For months, officials have refused to explain why Strzok was reassigned, but people familiar with the matter said it was ultimately Mueller's decision.
Among federal law enforcement officials, there is great concern that exposure of the texts they exchanged may be used by the president and his defenders to attack the credibility of the Mueller probe, and the FBI more broadly, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Defenders of Strzok and Page inside the FBI said that because there was no direct supervisory role between Page and Strzok in the workplace, there wasn't anything professionally wrong about having an affair, but they added that they understood why Mueller would not want anyone engaged in such conduct on his team. For one thing, if a foreign intelligence agency learned of such an affair, it could try to use it as a means of blackmail, though there's no evidence anyone outside the FBI was aware of the relationship.
The president's defenders in Congress have called for a special counsel to investigate how the FBI handled the Clinton probe and other Clinton-connected matters. Word of the texts could give new fuel to those demands.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Entous of The Washington Post.
A Section on 12/03/2017