Peter Strzok escorted out of Federal Bureau of Investigation building

His counsel also claimed the agent "wants the chance to clear his name and tell his story".

Strzok, who was escorted out of an FBI office Monday but remains employed by the bureau, has been at the center of the controversy over whether top FBI and DOJ officials showed bias in their handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe and the Trump-Russia probe. "It's the reason why Bob Mueller removed Peter Strzok, who is an excellent agent, removed him from the investigation", Comey told CNN's Jake Tapper.

"When asked about this text message, Strzok stated that he did not specifically recall sending it, but that he believed that it was meant to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation", the report said.

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

Strzok is now embroiled in an internal FBI investigation stemming from findings in outlined in a report from the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, which details a number of private text messages and use of personal email for FBI business.

In his book released earlier this year, Comey said he shared one memo - about a February conversation with Trump in which he alleged that the president asked him to let go an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn - with a friend, Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman. "Right?!" Page texted him.

"No. No he won't".

This comes after the IG report disclosed more anti-Trump sentiment by the official, including a text vowing to stop then-candidate Trump from becoming president.

Recently Nunes requested documents related to an informant who spoke to members of the Trump campaign during the election as the FBI's Russian Federation investigation began.

Strzok's lawyer Aitan Goelman called it "critically flawed" for the OIG to conclude that it "cannot rule out "with confidence" the possibility that Special Agent Strzok's political "bias" may have been a cause of the FBI's failure, between September 29 and October 25, 2016, to seek a second search warrant for the Anthony Weiner laptop". "It will go down as a dark and unsafe period in American History!" "It was about communicating about classified topics on that system when those topics have to be done on a classified system".

"As I said the other night, the investigators now need to be investigated if we're going to see justice here", Giuliani told Hannity.

Goelman said that if asked to testify, Strzok would be willing to testify without immunity, and would not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.

The inspector general's findings were forwarded to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility to determine whether Strzok and other employees should face discipline.

"The kind of drumbeat - the repeated assertion of bias and the investigation was infected by anti-Trump bias - it's completely illogical because the only thing that Pete and the FBI's actions or inactions did throughout this period of time benefited Trump and hurt Hillary's electoral chances, " Goelman said.