New Justice Department report asks: In anti-Trump text probe, what happened to Strzok, Page iPhones?

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It’s a little complicated, but it appears the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has uncovered a serious problem relating to the anti-Trump texts exchanged by two former top FBI investigators, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Here is what Horowitz lays out in a new report:

Shortly after being appointed in May 2017, Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller hired Strzok and Page. When he did so, he issued them work iPhones. A short time later, Horowitz, who was investigating the department’s Hillary Clinton probe, discovered that Strzok and Page, using their old FBI phones, had exchanged virulently anti-Trump text messages. Horowitz told Mueller, who thought the situation serious enough to remove Strzok and Page. Yet it appears the Mueller office stripped Page’s iPhone of all data without ever checking on its contents, and they stripped Strzok’s iPhone after a perfunctory check that may or may not have taken note of the content of its text messages. When Horowitz asked for and (belatedly) received the phones, he could recover nothing from them.

Horowitz explains the situation in a brief report, “Recovery of Text Messages From Certain FBI Mobile Devices,” which was released last week. Here, in a little more detail, is what he found:

During the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email affair and early Trump-Russia probes, Strzok and Page received FBI-issued Samsung Galaxy S5 phones, which were later replaced by Samsung Galaxy S7 phones. Some of the well-known problems with retaining many of their texts, anti-Trump and otherwise, arose from the failure of the FBI to archive texts after the S5-to-S7 changeover.

Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017. Strzok and Page joined the investigation shortly after and were issued special counsel iPhones. They apparently used those phones in addition to the Samsung S7s, which they still had. – READ MORE

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