In a not-at-all shocking development, the missing text messages between Trump-skeptic FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, during a critical time period have been recovered by the Department of Justice according to a letter sent Thursday morning to committees on the Hill.
In a letter sent to congressional committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”
“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” Horowitz said. “We will provide copies of the text messages that we recover from these devices to the Department so that the Department’s leadership can take any management action it deems appropriate.”
Strzok and Page are, of course, the agents at the center of the firestorm surrounding potentially politically-biased corruption within the FBI and the larger DOJ. They are said to have exchanged over 50,000 texts in a 5 month period, with one of those texts leading to discussion of a “secret society” within the DOJ that some have taken seriously while others have written off as a joke between lovers who bonded over a distaste for the new president.
The agents were originally part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation but were let go after the anti-Trump text exchanges were discovered. Some of those exchanges were lost due to a reported technical glitch related to phone upgrades, leading Attorney General Jeff Sessions to say Monday that he would leave “no stone unturned” in determining what happened to the messages.
The time period missing from the exchanges — the same ones that were apparently rediscovered Thursday — covers a stretch that includes President Trump’s inauguration, the firings of both National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James Comey, and the introduction of Mueller as Special Counsel tapped to investigate allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member