SAUNDERS

bad that Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed him from the Russia probe after Inspector General Michael Horowitz showed him the texts in July. The problem was clear: The FBI lovebirds seemed unable to control their feelings about Trump. And that is a problem.

Strzok also worked on the Clinton investigation — you know, the one where FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement exonerating the 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful before the FBI interviewed her. (In May, Trump fired Comey.)

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recused himself in the Clinton probe not from the get-go, but

on Nov. 1, 2016. (Former Virginia Gov. and Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe had donated some half a million dollars to McCabe’s wife’s campaign for a Virginia state senate seat.) Recently and rather abruptly, McCabe retired from the FBI.

Some might say that Mueller yanked Strzok from the Trump Russia probe and McCabe is gone so the system works.

But a larger question remains: Why does the same cluster of names keep popping up in political investigations?

So you get Mueller, who is close to Comey and a former FBI director, investigating Trump’s firing of former FBI Director Comey. And you get Strzok involved in probes of both 2016 nominees along with his lover, though she left the Trump

probe rather quickly.

Aren’t there any good FBI agents in Kansas?

“It makes no sense to me at all,” Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said of Comey’s choices to work on the Clinton and Trump probes. Stewart added, it’s not as though Strzok and Page made a secret of their politics.

Throw in the FBI’s applications for FISA warrants with the dubious claims about Steele not talking to the media, and Stewart sees “abuses of power by people in very powerful positions in the FBI.”

When the Johnson Committee report disclosed that Page texted Strzok on Sept. 2, 2016, that former President Barack Obama “wants to see everything we’re doing,”

the Trump corner wondered exactly what that meant.

“My understanding of that is that the president (Obama) is about to go see Vladimir Putin,” Bergmann explained, and hence wanted to know the latest on Russian mischief. “If we’re going to accuse a world leader, we don’t want to go in thin.”

Probably Bergmann is right. But really, there’s only one way for voters to know — a release of the Democrats’ rebuttal, which the House Intelligence Committee can do, followed by a release of the FISA warrant applications.