The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee acknowledged Thursday that a reference made between two FBI employees of a “secret society” could have been said in jest as opposed to evidence of an anti-Donald Trump plot.
“It’s a real possibility,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, told CNN.
Republicans have seized on the exchange between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok, which was sent after the 2016 presidential election, as potential evidence of an anti-Trump bias at the agency. Strzok was a member of the team investigating Hillary Clinton’s email server and, later, a member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team looking into Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election.
Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday about the “secret society” reference, Johnson suggested bias and potential corruption “at the highest levels of the FBI.”
