Sessions acknowledges missing FBI texts
Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged Monday that the FBI’s information system failed to preserve five months of text messages between two bureau officials who had disparaged then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 election.
The discovery of the communications earlier this year prompted the removal of Peter Strzok, a senior counter-intelligence agent, from the staff of Russia special counsel Robert Mueller.
Strzok had been communicating by text message for months with colleague Lisa Page, who also had been assigned to Mueller’s team, but had returned her duties at the FBI before the text messages were found.
The Justice Department turned over a tranche of communications between the two officials to Congress last month covering a period between August 2015 to December 2016. In those contacts, Strzok, who also helped run the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, referred to Trump as an “idiot” and the two expressed a clear preference for the Democratic candidate.
In all, Justice identified about 50,000 messages between the two.
In a statement Monday, Sessions said the FBI had not retained messages between the two, from Dec.14, 2016 to May 17, 2017, the day Mueller was appointed to lead Justice’s inquiry into Russia interference in the 2016 election.
Mueller’s appointment followed Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from overseeing that matter because he failed to disclose pre-election meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
A number of congressional panels have requested the text communications between Strzok and Page to examine whether Mueller’s investigation was biased against Trump. The texts were first discovered this summer by the Justice Department’s inspector general who is in the midst of a wide-ranging review of the department’s handling of the Clinton investigation.
“The department apprised the congressional committees of the missing text messages on Friday,” Sessions said. “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.
“We will leave no stone un-turned 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.
Republican lawmakers have seized on the text communications to question the credibility of Mueller’s continuing inquiry and to call for a second special counsel to examine the FBI’s handling of the matter.
In a statement Monday, the Republican chairmen of three influential House panels–the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees–called the missing communications “concerning.”
The missing messages, the chairmen said, represent a “critical gap encompassing the FBI’s Russia investigation.”
Source:-Â https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/01/22/sessions-acknowledges-missing-fbi-texts/1056113001/
