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Newly-released texts from former FBI agent Peter Strzok suggest that the Obama administration’s investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump for supposed “Russia collusion” began earlier than the official government narrative has acknowledged.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, released new texts on Thursday from Strzok. One text, dated July 28, 2016, refers to “[o]ur open C[counter-]I[ntelligence] investigations relating to Trump’s Russian connections.”

As the report notes, that was the date the FBI was tipped off by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about a conversation in a bar with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who had suggested that Russia might have Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. (Clinton and her aides had deleted tens of thousands of emails from her time as Secretary of State, which she had housed on an illicit private server at her home. Then-FBI Director James Comey recommended against her prosecution.)

A Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General report in December 2019 claimed that the FBI opened its investigation into the Trump campaign, known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016, three days after receiving the Downey tip.

But the Strzok text, written to FBI lawyer Lisa Page — with whom he had an affair — suggests that the FBI already had open “investigations,” plural, on supposed connections between Trump and Russia, none of which ever turned up any evidence.

Critics of the FBI have long suspected that the investigations began earlier. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to investigate Trump’s supposed Russia ties.

The so-called “Russia dossier,” which later served as a basis for the FBI’s surveillance warrants from the secretive FISA court, was prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele, using a sub-source who was himself a suspected Russian spy. The lawyer who arranged the research was Marc Elias, who represented Democrats in election lawsuits nationwide in 2020, pushing for the expansion of vote-by-mail, which played a significant role in President-elect Joe Biden’s eventual victory.