Posted on 01/22/2018 10:09:53 AM PST by Red Badger
The latest news that five months’ worth of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and DOJ attorney Lisa Page is sure to make supporters of President Donald Trump continue to claim that the Russia investigation is a politically-motivated scheme. More importantly, however, Trump’s lawyers will now be able to do the same.
Strzok has already been outed as anti-Trump, leading to his dismissal from the probe, and his past communications with Page showed a potential Justice Department bias towards Hillary Clinton. The fact that now nearly half a year’s worth of text messages between Strzok and Page during the time leading up to Robert Mueller‘s appointment as Special Counsel weren’t preserved by the Justice Department will surely fuel motions from Team Trump’s lawyers against the investigation.
Months of text messages don’t just accidentally disappear. One past conversation between Strzok and Page indicated that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew there would be no charges filed against Clinton well before that investigation ended. Given the significant evidence of impropriety in the Clinton case, a foregone conclusion of innocence before the FBI wrapped up their investigation looks shady at best. Trump’s lawyers will surely argue that after those messages came to light, the DOJ intentionally “lost” those five months’ worth of other messages.
Look for Paul Manafort to jump all over this. He’s already fighting his indictment, claiming that Mueller is overstepping his authority and shouldn’t be running the investigation. Throw in this evidence that the investigation may have been tainted before Mueller even took over, and that the DOJ could be covering up damaging information, and a motion to dismiss alleging prosecutorial misconduct is a near certainty. FBI Agent Strzok was reportedly heading up the Manafort investigation before he was taken off the Mueller probe. Manafort’s attorney might try to say that the missing text messages could contain exculpatory evidence (or evidence favorable to the defendant) and therefore the court should get to the bottom of what the two said. However, two former federal prosecutors who spoke to Law&Crime both contend it would be difficult to get the entire indictment dismissed based on the text messages alone.
“It depends on what FBI’s retention policy is for text messages. It does certainly raise questions as to how these five months came up missing,” explained Bill Thomas, a former federal prosecutor “However, the court is not going to just dismiss the case. If it comes to it, the judge may hold a hearing to get to that information through calling witnesses. Dismissal is the nuclear option, it would have to be something very very egregious for a court to dismiss the case.”
The same would go for any future defendants in the case. If other members of the Trump campaign gets hit with charges, they’ll just throw these missing texts back as evidence that the probe was tainted from the beginning.
Of course, lawyers will have to find some sort of evidence of foul play for this to mean anything. That could include proof that the messages were intentionally deleted, recovery of some of the texts (should they include incriminating information), or other evidence of political bias in the investigation.
“Though it doesn’t look good and will only further embolden conspiracy theorists I don’t see how this could be used to attack any charges already filed or future charges,” former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer explained to Law&Crime. “A judge will focus on whether clear evidence supports the charges in response to a motion to dismiss. Perhaps at trial this stuff could be used to cross examine the agent for purposes of showing bias.”
Barring the discovery of evidence favorable to the defendants, this development will likely result in a slight headache for Mueller as his team responds to court filings by claiming that the investigation is on the up and up, and that Strzok’s dismissal was proof that politics have no place in the Russia probe.
We would get more bang for our buck buying up cemetery space. Stack 'em as deep as needed to squeeze them all in. Their elevator is stuck on down anyway, this will help 'em along.
If there is no law...... then there is no law
As you say. Stack up the bodies and don’t worry. History will sort it out for the good guys.
This is dumb
Now they need to figure out what burner phones were used.
Thanks Red Badger.
Add this:
The FBI informed congress over the weekend that what is ostensibly our nation’s top, numero uno, bestest of all the best law enforcement agencies has had a computer “glitch” and “lost” five months worth of texts between deep state FBI agent Peter Strzok and his illicit lover, deep state DOJ lawyer Lisa Page. That five month period began on December 14, 2016, the date that the fake news media began pushing the false narrative that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking of the DNC computers in mid-2016.
to this:
Investigators in both House and Senate were stunned late Friday when, receiving a batch of newly-released texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they also received notice from the bureau that the FBI "failed to preserve" Strzok-Page messages from December 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017... on May 17, 2017 — the final day of the missing texts — the appointment of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
and this:
Members of the FBI and Justice Department's top brass at their Washington D.C.headquarters and other field offices are now using burner phones to stay under the radar of federal investigators and lawmakers, according to FBI insiders.
.@FBI says texts are missing? Don't believe it. As @JudicialWatch has found with "missing" and "deleted" Hillary Clinton and Lois Lerner emails, Deep State statements about "missing" electronic documents often turn out not to be true.
Like withholding evidence? Yeah, I'd think that would qualify.
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Worse that withholding...how about destroying evidence? That would certainly qualify as very very egregious.
It has been already demonstrated in academic studies that it is possible to track persons-of-interest by monitoring anonymous "burner" calls within selected geographic regions and analyzing the interconnections. It only takes one call to one known phone number and the entire network can be unraveled.
It might even be possible to get a legitimate court order to activate such programs, if they existed.
Wouldn't that be interesting?
It is impossible to understand why this is not the final straw in causing Sessions to dismiss Mueller and have federal marshalls come in and clean house.
Axios is reporting that Sessions told Wray to fire McCabe and Wray said he’d leave too if that was an order..
saw it on Ingraham.....
Every time I think this can’t get worse, it does!
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