The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.
There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?
The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.
But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn’t discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]How does the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world “lose” five months of text messages in an important case?
That’s what Republicans and, increasingly, the American public want to know about the FBI. As questions emerged about the strong anti-Trump bias of investigators, the bureau claimed to have misplaced key evidence… but third-party security experts aren’t buying the official story.
“The FBI may have ignored its own data storage procedures as it lost five months of text messages between two anti-Trump FBI employees, security analysts said,” The Washington Times reported.
“I can’t say that I ever saw anything like this during my time with the FBI,” declared Don Vilfer, a former government agent who is now a computer forensics expert in the private sector.
“It’s an anomaly that something like this would happen,” he elaborated.
That “anomaly” is becoming more puzzling as the text message saga unfolds. The FBI claims that it had the possibly incriminating messages, then lost them, before its parent agency found them again. – READ MORE
[contentcards url=”http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-justice-department-withholds-majority-of-fbi-texts/article/2647289″ target=”_blank”]