Months of missing messages exchanged between two FBI employees have been recovered, the Department of Justice’s inspector general said.
Months of missing messages exchanged between two FBI employees have been recovered, the Department of Justice’s inspector general said Thursday.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) in a letter that the messages spanning from December 2016 to May 2017, previously though missing due to a technological glitch affecting FBI phones, have been found.
The office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices,” the letter read.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that the texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page do not demonstrate a bias in the federal probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin as Republicans have insisted.
FBI officials’ anti-Trump texts deleted by cellphone glitch
“It doesn’t show a biased investigation,” Nadler told CNN.
Strzok and Page were having an affair at the time of the texts and exchanged several messages critical of presidential candidates including Trump.
Trump and his fellow Republicans have seized on the messages that were disparaging of the President as evidence that the FBI and Mueller’s investigation are filled with Democrat-leaning officials.
Trump called the missing messages “one of the biggest stories in a long time.”
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Strzok was assigned to special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but was let go after the discovery of months-old texts criticizing Trump.
Previously, he worked on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State.
Several Republican lawmakers have said that the texts between Strzok and Page led them to believe that there was a secret cabal in the upper levels of the FBI seeking to undercut the President.
One text between the pair referenced a “secret society,” which GOPs latched on to as proof of an anti-Trump plot.
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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of those who floated the idea, backed off the conspiracy theory-level rhetoric on Thursday, admitting that the “secret society” line may have been made in jest.
“It’s a real possibility,” Johnson said.
A day earlier, he suggested that the reference indicated potential corruption “at the highest levels of the FBI.”
Others insinuated that the months of missing messages was part of a coverup.
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Trump referred to the missing texts late Tuesday night, asking about the whereabouts of the «50,000 important text messages.”
That figure, however, refers to the total number of texts between Strzok and Page that the Justice Department inspector general has reviewed on FBI servers.
He also mocked the FBI for blaming the glitch that made initially hampered recovering the missing messages on Samsung.
The bureau said that a software glitch on some Samsung phones led to the lost texts.
