Sessions announces DOJ probe of over 50,000 missing FBI text messages

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday announced the Justice Department will investigate missing text messages sent between two FBI agents critical of President Trump, joining the chorus of Republican lawmakers who are eager to recover the exchange.

GOP officials have seized on the messages as evidence of FBI bias against Trump in the probes into Russian election meddling and Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server as secretary of State.

“We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source,” Sessions said in a statement.

“I have spoken to the Inspector General and a review is already underway to ascertain what occurred and to determine if these records can be recovered in any other way. If any wrongdoing were to be found to have caused this gap, appropriate legal disciplinary action measures will be taken,” he continued.

An investigation revealed that FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page had privately sent disparaging text messages about Trump during the election. Special counsel Robert Mueller removed the two officials from his team after the exchange became known.

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Things just got uglier for the embattled FBI.

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

And now more text messages are missing from more FBI agents, according to the Justice Department.

That means 50,000 text messages.

Fifty.

Thousand.

You read that correctly.

The original disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC.

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

“The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,” Boyd wrote.

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