Following the not entirely surprising news at the end of last week that The FBI “failed to preserve” five months of text messages between various anti-Trump agents, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed today that the department of justice has launched a full investigation into this debacle.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
More than 50,000 texts were exchanged between the two FBI officials who have come under fire for exchanging anti-Trump messages during the 2016 election.
“The FBI has informed [the Department of Justice] that many FBI-provided Samsung 5 mobile devices did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”
But, in another comedic twist, when asked Monday whether the FBI “failed to preserve” text message records on similar “Samsung 5” devices belonging to any other FBI officials during that time period, the FBI told Fox News they had “no comment”.
In a statement to Fox News, Sessions said:
“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.
“If we are successful, we will update the congressional committees immediately.”
Sessions added that:
“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.”
An OIG spokesperson declined to comment.
“The claim that five months of critical evidence went missing due to a technical glitch is really hard to take at face value,” a source from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told Fox News on Monday, leaving the door open for that committee to also launch a formal inquiry with the FBI.
What a farce..
Unreal. We’ve been asking for the remaining text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents (and former Mueller team members), Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The FBI now says the texts are “missing.”
If it wasn’t already clear we need a second special counsel, it’s abundantly clear now https://t.co/nvpNY4s4QV
— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) January 22, 2018
via RSS http://ift.tt/2E01zI1 Tyler Durden