The Justice Department acknowledged in a statement on Thursday night that copies of private text messages exchanged between two former special counsel investigators were disclosed to certain members of the media before they were given to Congress, even though those disclosures “were not authorized.”
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told Politico that the text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were given to key members of the House Judiciary Committee the night before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s public testimony on Wednesday.
The DOJ’s Public Affairs division shared the same messages with a group of reporters after they were shared with the lawmakers, Flores said. But some members of the media “had already received copies.”
“As we understand now, some members of the media had already received copies of the texts before that — but those disclosures were not authorized by the department,” she said.
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