"The media’s practice of anonymous sources allowed Strzok to hurt Trump without exposing his own biases."

Daniel Greenfield writes at Sultan Knish,

...Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

"Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can't read it," Strzok's mistress texted him.

"Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I 'find' it and tell the team?" he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

Negative pre-election stories coming from inside the government were one way to do it. The media’s practice of anonymous sources allowed Strzok to hurt Trump without exposing his own biases.

The media coverage of the fake investigation was shaped by activists like Strzok. The public only saw the final product on CNN. Only now is it getting a sense of how that message was manufactured and distributed in the shadows.

Strzok and Page were part of a larger Washington D.C. establishment. Its members might work for the Washington Post, the EPA, and the FBI or for one of the big law firms, but they were all living in the same swamp. And they shared a common view of Trump as a threat to their way of doing business.

The leaks were the swamp’s way of doing business. Hit pieces were its insurance policy against change.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The investigations of Trump triggered counter-investigations of the investigators. Strzok had warned Page not to use her work phone for these searches. But, like Hillary Clinton, it was already too late. The text messages of the investigators reveal the corruption of the investigation. And they show the level of coordination between the media and Trump’s opponents within the FBI.

The Fusion GPS story has told us a great deal about what goes on behind the scenes in the media. The Strzok and Page texts are a window into how the big government swamp was dealing with Trump.

Peter Strzok wanted an insurance policy against Trump’s victory. But he should have considered an insurance policy against swamp drainage instead.

Read more here.