Just slogged through the entire Peter Strzok hearing– all seven hours of it. The most striking part of the testimony was how composed, professional, and cogent he was in the face of the ridiculously transparent and self serving questioning coming from the Republicans. It was clear pretty early on that they were trying to draw a clear line indicating that the one and only reason why the investigation (and the 32 and counting criminal indictments) of the President’s political allies was due to partisan bias on the part of Strzok and other senior FBI officials. Unfortunately, this line of thought bumps directly into the reality that the FBI (and Strzok in particular) went out of their way not to impact the election in a negative way for Trump, even when it would have been trivially easy for them to do so (see Comey). “No bias can be possessed by our law enforcement officials!” they bleated, a ridiculous line of argument, as EVERYONE has opinions, political and otherwise, along with other prejudices, preferences, and predispositions. That is what makes us human. Processes and procedures are explicitly designed to counteract bias in science. It’s investigation 101– the training these professionals receive is explicitly designed to minimize chance of bias impacting the pursuit of cold, hard facts. To that end, the DOJ Inspector General investigated the FBI’s behavior and did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed in Chapter Five, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual. Which is exactly what you’d expect from highly trained and motivated professionals.