DOJ HUNTS AGENT’S MISSING TEXTS
Report: FBI’s Wray threatened to resign
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department will “leave no stone unturned” to locate five months’ worth of missing text messages from an FBI agent who was removed last summer from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team for voicing anti-Trump sentiments, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said yesterday.
The department last month began providing lawmakers with copies of texts to and from FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was reassigned following the discovery of anti-Trump messages he had traded with an FBI lawyer.
The department on Friday gave additional text messages to congressional committees, which had re- quested copies of commu- nications over a two-year period ending last July. But a letter accompanying that delivery revealed that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. The latter date is when Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The explanation for the gap was “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,” the letter stated.
In a statement yesterday, Sessions said the Justice Department 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.”
Meanwhile, the news site Axios.com, citing unnamed sources, reported yesterday that FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign after Sessions pressured him to remove Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Sessions that McCabe wasn’t worth losing Wray. If Wray had resigned, he would be the second FBI director to leave President Trump’s administration, after Trump fired James Comey. McCabe, seen as close to Comey, was involved in the controversial Hillary Clinton email investigation, and has been criticized because his wife received donations from Clinton supporters for her Virginia state Senate campaign.