"We’ll stop it"

The Department of Justice’s inspector general said Monday that his investigators went to extensive lengths to obtain a text message in which former FBI official Peter Strzok suggested that he planned to help prevent President Donald Trump from becoming president.

Michael Horowitz, the head of the DOJ’s office of inspector general (OIG), said that his cyber forensics team took four separate investigative steps before discovering a controversial Aug. 8, 2016 text message that Strzok sent to former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

The forensic team went as far as contacting the Pentagon for help in extracting text messages that were missing from Strzok and Page’s FBI-issued cell phones.

The text message in question was recovered early last month and first publicized on Friday in a report that the OIG released on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices.

“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page, the FBI lawyer, wrote to Strzok.

“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” replied Strzok, who served as the FBI’s top investigator on “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia.