DOJ Destroyed Missing Strzok/Page Text Messages Before The IG Could Review Them

The Department of Justice wiped text messages between former FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk from their cell phones before the Office of the Inspector General could review them, a new report from the DOJ watchdog reveals.

Page and Strozk’s involvement with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has been heavily scrutinized after it was revealed they had sent numerous anti-Trump text messages back and forth to one another. Mueller has been tasked with looking into whether or not Donald Trump and his campaign associates coordinated with Russian officials to steal the 2016 election away from Hillary Clinton.

The 11-page report reveals that almost a month after Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team, his government-issued iPhone was wiped clean and restored to factory settings by another individual working in Mueller’s office. The special counsel’s Record’s Officer told investigators that “she determined it did not contain records that needed to be retained.”

“She noted in her records log about Strzok’s phone: ‘No substantive texts, notes or reminders,'” the report states.

This is what I'm finding so far on Comey's activity in relation to Whitewater:

James Comey

After law school, Comey was a law clerk for United States District Judge John M. Walker Jr. in Manhattan. Then, he was an associate for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in their New York office. He joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he worked from 1987 to 1993. While there, he was Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division and helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. . .From 1996 to 2001, Comey was Managing Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Richmond Division of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.[12] In 1996, Comey acted as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee.[33] He also was the lead prosecutor in the case concerning the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.[34] While in Richmond, Comey was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law.

I noticed there was a gap in the above source in his history from 1993 to 1996. During this time he practiced private law at McGuireWoods:

James Comey

In 1993 he moved to Virginia and became a partner in the McGuireWoods law firm. Returning to government service, Comey became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in 1996.

James Comey Fast Facts

1993 - Hired by private law firm McGuire Woods.

1996 - Partner at McGuire Woods, specializing in criminal defense and commercial litigation.

Who is new FBI Director James Comey?

He was a partner at firm McGuireWoods, where, among other things, he successfully defended a company against claims its machinery had caused asbestos-related injuries.

He went from there to the Whitewater Committee, which he leveraged to advance his career:

Inside the FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton's E-Mail

Comey’s first brush with them came when Bill Clinton was president. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement. Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté,” Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”

Comey parlayed the Whitewater job into top posts in Virginia and New York, returning to Manhattan in 2002 to be the top federal prosecutor there. One of his first cases as a line attorney in the same office 15 years earlier had been the successful prosecution of Marc Rich, a wealthy international financier, for tax evasion. But on his last day as President in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich. “I was stunned,” Comey later told Congress. As top U.S. prosecutor in New York in 2002, appointed by George W. Bush, Comey inherited the criminal probe into the Rich pardon and 175 others Clinton had made at the 11th hour.

Despite evidence that several pardon recipients, including Rich, had connections to donations to Bill Clinton’s presidential library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, Comey found no criminal wrongdoing. He was careful not to let the investigation be used for political purposes by either party. When pressed for details in one case, he said, “I can’t really go into it because it was an investigation that didn’t result in charges. That may be a frustrating answer, but that’s the one I’m compelled to give.”

Question for techie types. Are texts stored on the phone or are they more like emails which are stored on a server somewhere?

There is no technical requirement to retain the texts on a server. Your typical smart phone has the capacity to store the texts of an army of Strzok-Page pairs. E.g., my phone has 288gb. That's a stupefying number of texts. So, there is no technical reason for a carrier to store a text, once it has been received by its addressee(s), which typically happens in a few seconds.

Of course, that doesn't mean the carriers don't store it. After all, disk space is cheap, so why not?

Also bear in mind, there are two levels of storage. There is metadata: the sender and receiver(s) and the date, and maybe the length, of each message. Metadata could be relevant to billing, depending on how much the carrier's business plan depends on nuisance charging. And then there is the actual content. All of the above, of course, can be grabbed by the feds.

But rest assured, whatever the carriers keep or discard, there is that gigantic server farm in Bluffdale, Utah, which has the capacity to store all voice traffic, not to mention all texts, metadata plus data. What could go wrong?

E.g., it's approaching New Year's Day, 2017, and an incoming Trump appointee on vacation in the Caribbean gets a call from a government official in Washington. Only problem is, the government official is of the Russian, not the American, government, and he's newly gobsmacked by the Muslim Traitor's sanctions against his country, and wonders WTF the American can do ...

Now imagine you are Andy McCabe, and you have no use whatsoever for that Trump appointee, having tangled with him in the past over an FBI personnel issue, and you have (illegitimate) access to Bluffdale, and it's time to redeem the "insurance policy" and save the Deep State and your sorry ass!

There was once a fire in a Little Rock building where the Clintons lost a large number of documents. James Comey was their lawyer at the time. Huh. 8 posted by Slyfox

January 3, 2018 : Fire at Bill and Hillary Clinton's Chappaqua House (UPDATE ... www.tmz.com/2018/01/03/bill-and-hillary-clinton-house-fire-chappaqua The New York home of Bill and Hillary Clinton is on fire. The Chappaqua Fire Dept. tells TMZ a structure on the property is ablaze and they are on the scene trying to control it.

November 24, 2012 : 4 injured in fire at US state depatment on the 8th floor WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fire broke out during routine maintenance at the U.S. State Department on Saturday, injuring four maintenance workers, officials said. The fire began inside ductwork on the building’s eighth floor at about 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) as workers were replacing insulation, State Department and fire officials said. Workers doused the fire with hand-held extinguishers before fire department personnel arrived, District of Columbia Battalion Chief Edward Mills said. Mills, who was one of the first responders to the scene, told Reuters TV the cause of the fire remained under investigation but did not immediately appear suspicious. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-fire-statedepartment/four-injured-in-fire-at-u-s-state-department-idUKBRE8AO00A20121125

[let me guess, water from the 8th floor then ruined records on the 7th...]

The only way this could get more suspicious would be if Edward Mills, 1st on the scene, was related to Cheryl Mills...

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