The waters of the Russia probe have been frothed up, given the news of two FBI agents working with Robert Mueller’s team, who apparently really didn’t like Donald Trump.

Upon learning of the text messages between agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, Mueller fired Strzok from the investigation, back in July. Page had already finished her work with the team and moved on.

Still, this is the nugget Trump apologists have piled on, in hopes of discrediting the entire investigation.

It doesn’t negate a troubling favoritism Trump has for a hostile government, or that he surrounded himself with a lot of unscrupulous people, often uncomfortably tied to Russia, in some way.

A new Washington Post story is mapping out Trump’s early defenses of Russia, as he was apparently coerced into saying he believed Russia was behind the hacking of DNC emails.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one of the aides said, according to the Post. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

On Jan. 11, before Trump was sworn in, he told reporters that “as far as hacking, I think it was Russia.”

“We also get hacked by other countries and other people,” he added.

Following his comments, Trump reportedly told aides the remarks were “not me.”

“It wasn’t right,” he said, according to the Post.

What wasn’t right about it? Across the board, U.S. intelligence organizations agree that it was Russia. The pattern is not unlike what they do in other nations. Creating chaos and internal strife is just their thing.

The firestorm around Strzok and Page is being milked to the last drop by Republicans and the White House.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, was in the hot seat on Wednesday, grilled by the House Judiciary Committee, with Republican members coming down hard on him over what they saw as conflicts of interest.

The drive from partisans and Trump loyalists seems to be to erode confidence in our own intelligence community, because of the personal opinions of two FBI agents (because everybody knows, once you join the FBI, you stop being a person with opinions, or something), in an effort to prop up a disastrous, ill-conceived, and possibly corrupt presidency.

It’s a dangerous ploy to save the reputation of a man who is harder on fellow Americans than he is on a foreign government that would love nothing more than to see us broken.