From the get-go Wednesday, CNN host Chris “Fredo” Cuomo telegraphed that he wasn’t going to take his interview with disgraced, former FBI agent Peter Strzok seriously. “They were the text messages that launched everything from conspiracy theories to congressional investigations. Not to mention more than 50 presidential tweets and countless hours of programming on state TV, a.k.a. Fox,” he mocked.

Of course, he would! Strzok was there to peddle his anti-Trump book alleging Russian collusion, something the FBI investigation didn’t find.

Fredo didn’t get to those text messages until the end of the interview. “As you are well aware, I don't report on people’s personal lives. I’ve never had any interest in you and Lisa Page and what was going on personally,” he told his guest.

He refused to go into their contents because he would have to mention how Strzok had promised Page that he and his team would stop then-candidate Donald Trump from getting elected, and the “insurance policy” he said he had once Trump won.

What Cuomo wanted to know was how haunted he was by the texts shared by the President’s defenders:

I do want to ask you though, from a personal perspective. How haunted are you that those text messages loom so large in the defense of the supporters of Donald Trump and Donald Trump himself. That they relied on that as proof that everything else had to be false? How does that haunt?

What kind of question is that?

It was designed to tee up Strzok to romanticize and lie about the work his team did in investigating the Trump campaign. “Things that I did, things that all the people around me did, whether inspector general, U.S. attorneys, and Congress conclusively determine that all the time we were doing an objective, good job for the American people,” he proclaimed.