Justice Department finds some missing FBI text messages
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department now says it has recovered some of the missing text messages between two FBI officials who have become a focus for Republican charges of bias in the FBI.
Last week, the department reported that, because of a technical snafu, the FBI had lost all messages sent from bureau mobile phones from December 2016 to May 2017. That included a string of messages between Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who had worked on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
Text messages released in December show the pair exchanged strings of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump and other politicians during the campaign. Strzok, who also was assigned to the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, was reassigned after the texts surfaced earlier last year.
Trump, who has claimed the texts show evidence of bias against him, has worked to focus attention on the issue, tweeting Tuesday that the missing texts were “one of the biggest stories in a long time.”
In a letter sent Thursday to the chairs of the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office had successfully used forensic tools to recover some of the text messages between Strzok and Page.
“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” he wrote.
The letter did not say how many messages had been recovered, or say anything about their content. The messages will be reviewed by the department before they are released, Horowitz wrote.
In recent weeks, many Republicans have pivoted to instead focus on whether the FBI conspired against Trump when it began investigating the campaign, citing anti-Trump texts between two Justice Department officials who were at one point part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Trying to stem some of that criticism, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday that it had located several months’ worth of text messages the department had previously said it couldn’t find.
Several congressional committees have been reviewing text messages and have been slowly releasing them. Senate Judiciary is one of those panels, and late Thursday, Grassley revealed additional texts in a letter he sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In the newly released texts, Strzok and Page discuss the investigation of Hillary Clinton campaign emails and note that she could be the next president.
“The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear,” Page texts, referring to dealing with Clinton.
Meanwhile, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer criticized the Republicans who have been escalating attacks on the FBI and Justice Department as Mueller’s investigation has come closer to Trump’s inner circle. Schumer singled out a classified memo that the House intelligence committee has produced and may move to make public.
“What began as an attempt to discredit the investigator has now devolved into delusional, self-serving paranoia,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech.
In a letter Wednesday, the Justice Department warned the House intelligence panel’s Republican chairman, California Rep. Devin Nunes, that releasing the classified memo could be “extraordinarily reckless” and asked to review it.
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote Nunes that given the panel’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence community, “you well understand the damaging impact that the release of classified material could have on our national security and our ability to share and receive sensitive information from friendly foreign governments.”