This name is getting a little too familiar – and Americans should be getting very angry. Amid the blockbuster report by The Daily Caller that a Chinese firm had penetrated Hillary Clinton’s private email server “throughout” her time as secretary of state, one FBI figure is mentioned prominently.

And it’s the same agent who’s appeared at almost every sordid turn in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the Clinton email investigation and the  trumped up “collusion” case against President Donald Trump – the now-fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok.

According to The Daily Caller, Strzok, who was a one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence agents,  was briefed by investigators with the Intelligence Community Department of Inspector General (ICIG) about the possibility that Clinton’s email server had been compromised by a foreign intelligence service.

The meeting took place sometime after the ICIG had discovered an “anomaly” on Clinton’s server that indicated information that was placed on it was being surreptitiously copied by another entity. That discovery was made “pretty early in 2015,” The Daily Caller reported.

The Daily Caller quoted a former intelligence official explaining the problem:

“When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China.”

That’s pretty serious stuff, considering Clinton was secretary of state – the top diplomat in the United States government. If emails she was writing were being copied – in real time – to a hostile foreign power like China, Americans would expect the FBI to take some sort of notice.

But Peter Strzok, under questioning by Rep. Louis Gohmert in July, said he didn’t even remember the conversation. In response to Gohmert, a Texas Republican, Strzok acknowledged speaking the ICIG investigator Frank Rucker but, unbelievably, said he didn’t remember what they’d talked about.

(Watch the CSPAN clip of the exchange here. Strzok’s smirk is as infuriating as his statements are, literally, incredible.)

“I remember meeting Mr. Rucker on either one or two occasions,” Strzok said. “I do not recall the specific content or discussions.”

If the “content” of the conversation was China spying on Hillary Clinton, that’s simply not possible.

In an editorial published Tuesday, the Investors Business Daily summed it up nicely:

“It seems unlikely that the FBI’s top counterintelligence official — who was leading the investigation into Clinton’s emails — wouldn’t remember being told that the Chinese had unfettered access to those emails while she was secretary of State.

“So, either Strzok is lying or the ICIG officials are. Our money is on Strzok.”

That’s as safe a bet as anyone ever made.

There are many, many figures in the Clinton email scandal that have disgraced themselves – not least the former secretary of state herself, President Barack Obama, who appointed her, and the political party and mainstream media that tried to make this woman the president of the United States.

But for sheer nuts-and-bolts deception, the FBI “counterintelligence agent” who clearly turned a blind eye to information that his favored candidate had been compromised by an intelligence operation from China, then had the effrontery to tell a United States congressman that he couldn’t remember the conversation is in a class by himself.

That isn’t just negligence, and it isn’t just a partisan passion to use the powers of the FBI to swing the outcome of a presidential election. It amounts to Strzok being a traitor to his duty to the bureau, and the Americans it’s supposed to serve.

Democrat voters outside Washington – infected by a bizarre mix of blind range at their loss in 2016 and what can only be described as staggering stupidity – could be forgiven for supporting obviously demented nutcases like Maxine Waters or doddering statists like Nancy Pelosi.

But now, just in time for the midterm elections, they’re being faced with evidence that not only did the Democrat Party’s 2016 presidential nominee put national security at risk for the entire time she was secretary of state, but minions in the FBI like the increasingly loathsome Peter Strzok have been helping her conceal it for their own ends.

Strzok worked directly for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe worked directly for former FBI Director James Comey. And it was James Comey who reacted to his own firing by President Donald Trump by leaking information that led directly to the hiring of Robert Mueller as special counsel investigating Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.

Those connections aren’t hard to make. Maybe someone in the Justice Department or the mainstream media might be able to connect the dots at some point and the country can realize what a bill of goods it’s been sold with the “Russian collusion” story.

Most Americans busy living their own productive lives might have thought the name “Strzok” was fading into the background by now. But it’s just getting familiar again – and it’s getting beyond infuriating.