Strzok exchanged his texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and the two were having an affair. And Strzok's text messages provided to Congress show him grappling with the fallout of making the letter public, according to a CNN review of his texts.

Ron Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter Wednesday night to the deputy attorney general asking that the Department of Justice turn over communications and records related to 16 current and former FBI and Justice Department officials. It appears that we now know the answer.

Andrew McCabe did leave the FBI in January 2018.

The texts between Strzok and Page have been of major interest to congressional Republicans, some of whom charge that Strzok's texts show that Mueller's investigation is biased against Trump.

That the Russiagate investigation of Trump was propelled by a "dossier" of lies and unproven allegations of squalid conduct in Moscow and Trumpian collusion with Russia. It is about discrediting important democratic institutions.

Strzok was an investigator on special counsel Robert Mueller's team before being ousted last July.

Yet the response to the new articles in some circles - to view the delay as proof of an anti-Trump conspiracy at the FBI - misunderstands what has long been known.

"One source said McCabe was exercising his retirement eligibility and characterized his decision as 'stepping aside'" reported NBC News.

And then, literally all of a sudden, pffffft. First, he considers Russia's Vladimir Putin a strong leader.

Trump views the entire federal government - including the Justice Department - as people who work for him. There were troubling judgments and misjudgments - fueled by excessive caution, bureaucratic considerations and turf issues - which unnecessarily left the emails unexamined for weeks, leaving open the question of whether they might reveal something new. Democrats have said the memo's release could compromise intelligence sources and methods. One of the White House officials said the memo would be in "Congress' hands" after Trump declassified it and there were unlikely to be any redactions to the document.

After those complaints, Wray reviewed the memo over the weekend.

Trump Jr.'s tweeted comments regarding McCabe's alleged firing wasn't the first such statement he made to that effect. As the classified memo has been described, it alleges that the FBI misled the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when seeking permission to spy on Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser with close business ties to Russia.

The truth is exactly to the contrary.

You think Giuliani did not want to be subject to confirmation hearings under oath about his role in the "deep state" operation that led to the Comey Oct. 28 letter?

It questioned the findings of an online dashboard maintained by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund think-tank, because the group does not publicly disclose the accounts it tracks.