***Article first published by 'The Western Journal' on May 21, 2018***

For more than a year, the Democrat-aligned media has denied and scoffed at allegations that elements within the Obama administration had spied upon the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

That all changed recently with the leaked admission of an “informant” who’d been querying marginal Trump campaign associates for information about supposed connections to Russia on behalf of former President Barack Obama’s FBI.

That admission, combined with the voluminous ream of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that had previously been released, have made it abundantly clear that Obama’s FBI was indeed running a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, one that was directed from the highest levels.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy recently shared what he had gleaned after a deep dive into the many texts between Strzok and Page, with a particular focus around the time the investigation into Trump’s campaign was initially opened.

McCarthy’s main takeaway was that the Department of Justice had redacted the juiciest and most revealing parts of those texts, specifically the names of high-ranking officials outside of the FBI who were involved in the investigation, among other bits of information potentially damning for the Obama administration.

There was one text in particular from Strzok that McCarthy highlighted that former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer felt should have garnered even more attention than it did, a message that appeared to indicate the involvement of the Obama White House in running the entire operation.

FBI Agent Peter Strozk and FBI Attorney Lisa Page

“Seems to me the headline here should have been the quote cited by Peter Strzok, attributed to a redacted source, saying ‘The White House is running this’, referring in August 2016 to the opening of the Trump counter-intelligence investigation,” Fleischer said in tweet posted Sunday.

That message from Strzok to Page was in regard to a high-level meeting — which included “agency people,” as in CIA officials — held Aug. 5, 2016 following his return from a trip to London where he presumably interviewed the FBI’s informant, though those particular details were redacted.

The message from Strzok read: “And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than (REDACTED) quote: ‘the White House is running this.’ My answer, ‘well, maybe for you they are.’ And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we’ve got an hour, but with Bill (Priestap) there, I’ve got no control.”

Bill Priestap was the assistant director of counterintelligence, and Strzok’s immediate superior in the FBI hierarchy.

Page replied: “Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We’ve got the emails that say otherwise.”

Two immediate questions arise from that exchange — who was the redacted official who stated the “White House is running this” in regard to the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and what exactly is contained in the emails referenced by Page “that say otherwise”?

If Congress hasn’t already demanded to know the answers to those questions, they better get on it soon. Odds are that redacted individual to whom the quote is attributed is an incredibly high-level official with some measure of authority whose identity, if revealed, would prove devastating to the entire Trump/Russia collusion investigation narrative.

McCarthy also wants to know what names and information are hidden behind the many redactions within the released texts, and wondered if it was classified or simply embarrassing to the DOJ/FBI/Obama administration if released.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the same FBI that cleared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the unauthorized transmission of classified material were themselves transmitting classified materials through text messages in an unauthorized manner.