The Justice Department
has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI
agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's
investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about
President Donald Trump.
But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of
messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete
because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and
retrieve about five months' worth of communications.
New text messages highlighted in a letter to FBI Director Christopher
Wray by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Committee, are from the spring and summer of
2016 and involve discussion of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's
use of a private email server. They reference Attorney General Loretta
Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in that case and a draft
statement that former FBI Director James Comey had prepared in
anticipation of closing out the Clinton investigation without criminal
charges.
The FBI declined to comment Sunday.
Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent who also worked the Clinton
email case, was reassigned last summer from the team investigating ties
between Russia and Trump's Republican presidential campaign after
Mueller learned he had exchanged politically charged text messages —
many anti-Trump in nature — with an FBI lawyer also detailed to the
group. The lawyer, Lisa Page, left Mueller's team before the text
messages were discovered.
The Justice Department last month produced for reporters and Congress
hundreds of text messages that the two had traded before becoming part
of the Mueller investigation. Many focused on their observations of the
2016 election and included discussions in often colorful language of
their personal feelings about Trump, Clinton and other public figures.
Some Republican lawmakers have contended the communication reveals the
FBI and the Mueller team to be politically tainted and biased against
Trump — assertions Wray has flatly rejected.
In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice
Department on Friday provided Johnson's committee with 384 pages of text
messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was
obtained by The Associated Press.
But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its
system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones
had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a
five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was
the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the
Russia investigation.
The explanation for the gap was "misconfiguration issues related to
rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the
FBI's collection capabilities."
In Johnson's letter to Wray, he asks whether the FBI has any records of
communications between Strzok and Page during that five-month window and
whether the FBI had searched their non-FBI phones for additional
messages. He also asks for the "scope and scale" of any other records
from the Clinton investigation that have been lost.
One of the messages references a change in language to Comey's statement
closing out the email case involving Clinton, Trump's Democratic
opponent in the 2016 presidential election.
While an earlier draft of the statement said Clinton and President
Barack Obama had an email exchange while Clinton was "on the territory"
of a hostile adversary, the reference to Obama was at first changed to
"senior government official" and then omitted entirely in the final
version.
In another exchange, the two express displeasure about the timing of
Lynch's announcement that she would defer to the FBI's judgment on the
Clinton investigation. That announcement came days after it was revealed
that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an
impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix, though both sides said
the email investigation was never discussed.
Strzok said in a July 1 text message that the timing of Lynch's
announcement "looks like hell." And Page appears to mockingly refer to
Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in the case as a "real
profile in courage since she knows no charges will be brought."
Days later, on July 5, Comey announced the FBI's recommendation that no criminal charges were merited.
source: abc news
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