As Valentine’s Day approaches, it occurs to me that all of us should be grateful that Special Agent Peter Strzok, former second-in-command of FBI counterintelligence, got the on-the-job hots for FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Driven by urges the intensity of which they probably hadn’t felt since late adolescence, the eager paramours produced a most revealing and totally unsecure mountain of text messages.

The latest tranche of their online correspondence provides a damning timeline regarding the FBI’s reaction to the discovery of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails on the laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner a/k/a Carlos Danger, the online pedo-perv married to Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin.

Recall that on July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey held an unprecedented press conference in which he corruptly white washed Clinton’s use of her private email server to compromise national security. Despite the overwhelming evidence of her guilt, with a straight face Comey absolved her of criminal responsibility by resorting to a laughably fatuous legal analysis. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Comey had completed his mission to save the Clinton candidacy. Case closed, right?

Not so fast. On September 28, 2016, Strzok texted Page, “Got called up to Andy’s [Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe] earlier…hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty [attorney] to sdny [U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York], includes a ton of material from spouse [Abedin]. Sending a team up tomorrow to review…this will never end.”

What to do? Strzok had staged the fake investigation of Clinton’s email server which had produced the laugh lines for Comey’s July vaudeville act. Now Clinton’s emails turn up in the possession of an online perv? How were they going to spin this?

Over the next month Comey and his cronies maintained radio silence while they sweated out their next move. They were in a jam. Understand this: what doesn’t appear in Strzok’s text message is that the Clinton emails were found on Weiner’s laptop by a joint FBI-NYPD task force which was investigating the former Congressman for his online activities with minors. Because of the NYPD’s involvement, the FBI couldn’t simply hide the newly discovered emails. The chance of a leak was too great.

So it was that on October 28, 2016, Comey advised Congress the FBI was reopening the Clinton email investigation. Quoth Comey, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday…” [Emphasis added.]

By this last remark about the briefing, was Comey trying to give the impression that he had learned about the discovery of Clinton’s emails on Weiner’s laptop only the day before? After all, he could have known about them for over a month and still been briefed the day before.

Well what happened? Did McCabe, Strzok and Page keep this explosive development from Comey for a month? That seems unlikely. But whatever happened, it is clear that the FBI hierarchy was once again forced to carry water for the Clinton campaign by at first keeping silent about Weiner’s laptop.

Clinton and the Democrats claim that Comey’s announcement about reopening the email investigation cost her the election. Congressional Democrats and the mainstream media have cited the timing of the announcement – close to election day – as proof that Comey was not part of any conspiracy to save Clinton’s candidacy from the electoral consequences of her blatant compromise of national security.

But what the Democrats and their media steno pool aren’t saying is that Comey’s hand was forced. He had to go public with the news about Weiner’s laptop because the NYPD had the goods. Faced with that sobering threat and the distinct probability that the NYPD was on the verge of spilling the beans to the media, Comey reopened the investigation and then re-closed it almost immediately claiming that his agents had performed what must have been a miracle of speed reading by determining in a matter of days that there was nothing of consequence in the hundreds of thousands of emails on Weiner’s laptop.

It wasn’t a perfect solution to the problem at hand (how to save Clinton’s campaign), but it was all they could do under the desperate  circumstances.