Posted on 01/21/2018 11:49:50 AM PST by billorites
The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.
The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).
“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC. (RELATED: FBI Agents Discussed ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Win)
He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.
Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”
“The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,” Boyd wrote.
Strzok and Page were significant players in the Clinton and Trump investigations. As deputy chief of counterintelligence, Strzok oversaw the Trump investigation when it was opened in July 2016. Weeks earlier, he had wrapped up his work as one of the top investigators on the Clinton email probe.
Both worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation until July 2017.
But Strzok was removed after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered text messages he exchanged with Page, with whom he was having an affair, in which both expressed strong criticism of Trump.
In one text, Strzok called Trump and “idiot.” In another, he said “F Trump.”
In another more cryptic exchange, Strzok spoke of an “insurance policy” that the FBI sought to take out in case Trump defeated Clinton in the election.
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016.
“Andy” was a reference to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” Strzok added. Republicans have questioned what Strzok meant by “insurance policy.”
Page left the Mueller team prior to the discovery of the texts.
Johnson expressed concern over the missing text messages, which were sent during a key period of the Russia investigation. During that time frame is when the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed News, when Strzok participated in a Jan. 24 interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, and when James Comey was fired as FBI director.
The end date of the missing Strzok-Page texts is also significant. That’s because May 17 is the day when Mueller was appointed to take over the FBI’s probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
“The loss of records from this period is concerning,” Johnson wrote in a letter sent Saturday to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Along with its disclosure of the missing text messages, DOJ’s Boyd handed over 384 additional text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page.
I read this stuff to and would love to believe it is true, but absent any action I can't accept any of it as anything other than wishful thinking. I accept that most of the crimes they outline are absolutely true, but they are committed by a protected class.
House Bank
House Post Office
House book deals........All still going on.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --October 11, 1798 John Adams
Our problem is a people problem.
The FBI should never wonder why people don’t trust them any longer .
Rule Number 1 for ALL Levels of Law Enforcement: Protect Your "Brothers"
And, they will kill you to do that.
...Not hung... hanged...
That too. Word police today?
> “ ... but absent any action I can’t accept any of it as anything other than wishful thinking”
Uh, do yourself a favor and come up to speed on the full Uranium One scandal. That is in the same pattern.
What we are dealing with here is a criminal network that hates the United States —> TREASON!
That is not an empty allegation. It takes me personally a lot of time and reflection to come to such conclusions but the dots have connected and the picture is shocking.
You’ll catch up later.
Exactly. Mueller is busy covering tracks for all of that and there are plenty of people involved included Broncobama which is why justice will not be done. If it is, it will be the first time in my lifetime. We have had many Communist in our government all too wealthy and powerful for justice, including the Parents of Kennedy and Bush.
Excellent point, except I refuse to give them the incompetency excuse. Continuous, long term incompetency that results in the erasure of a very specific vital piece of evidence is intentional.
Dec 21 EO tells us this time it’s different.
Don’t rely on past flubs to infer future performance. It’s different now.
‘Can’ and ‘will’ are not in the present bound together as they were in the past.
“I thought texts could be recovered”
If a pitiful little crime is committed in Bumf**k, Nebraska, old text messages can be released by the cell provider in a skinny minute. But THESE messages, between THESE specific people, can’t. Riiight.
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