A new report in the Daily Caller details an interesting exchange between FBI agent Peter Strzok, the man at the center of concerns the FBI and DOJ had been politicized against candidate Donald Trump, and Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee who spent hours grilling him yesterday in a sometimes raucous hearing.

Strzok was asked by Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler why he thought it was important to “prioritize” the Russia investigation in October 2016 over the recent reopening of the Clinton case due to the discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

“The first reason I did it is because the director told me to,” Strzok said, referring to Comey, “The director said it was our top priority.”

Strzok continued, “When you look at an allocation of resources based on the threat to national security, the Russia influence investigations were of much greater impact than a mishandling of classified information investigation.”

Nadler clarified, “The first reason was the director told you to?”

“Yes, sir,” Strzok said.

An interesting choice to say the least, especially considering that Politico was reporting way back in 2015 that Hillary Clinton’s private server was subject to hacking attempts from China, South Korea, Germany…and Russia. As early as 2013.

The last batch of Clinton’s emails released by the State Department under a court order in a Freedom of Information Act suit showed that Clinton received at least five emails from hackers linked to Russia. If Clinton opened attachments in the emails, her account and server could have been vulnerable to hacking, although it is unclear if she did so.

POLITICO reported last week that there were likely many more so-called phishing messages sent to Clinton during her four years as secretary, but virtually all those messages appear to have been deemed “personal” by Clinton’s attorneys and deleted, although the FBI is reportedly making progress recovering some or all of the messages from tech firms that worked on Clinton’s server.

The effort to make Russia’s desire to see Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton more damning than 4 years of an unsecured server by the Secretary of State is really quite remarkable. The indictment today of even more Russian agents said to be involved in hacking attempts to that end certainly supports the former.

But anyone who thinks they needed Donald Trump to tell them to do it either has a really short memory or isn’t living in reality.