As most of you know, when the subpoenaed records of text conversations between never Trump FBI agent, Peter Strzok, and his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page, were finally produced by the FBI, it developed that five months of conversations had mysteriously vanished. When questioned about it, the FBI came up with a very familiar cock-and-bull story. The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was told that there were “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

I can nearly hear the guffaws as that line was being composed.

Now the FBI has decided that if that excuse was good for two phones it would certainly work for lots of FBI phones. I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP.

The supposed “technical glitch” that caused months’ worth of text messages between anti-Trump FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to go missing has now purportedly affected thousands of FBI cellphones.

This latest development comes as officials recently learned that five months of text messages between Strzok and Page from December 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017 were lost at a time when investigators were in the process of discovering damning texts that showed a clear anti-Trump bias within the FBI, Fox News reported.

Department of Justice (DOJ) officials told Fox News that “the glitch affected the phones of ‘nearly’ 10 percent of the FBI’s 35,000 employees.”

I suppose that a failure of several thousand phones to perform correctly is more plausible than just two phones belonging to two central figures of this drama. It strains credulity to actually believe that this problem persisted at this level for this long and no one caught on. Even were one inclined to believe that this was possible, what are the odds that Strzok and Page would both be included in that “10%” of phones involved. And the FBI doesn’t claim it affected all the phones all the time during the alleged period of glitchiness. So why to the Strzok/Page text messages disappear at the same time. A mighty selective glitch.

As an additional issue, these messages are all covered by the Federal Records Act and every agency has systems in place to archive these texts and to flag devices that are not backing up.

But go big or go home, I guess.

Now Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who is already not happy with FBI obstruction, call bullsh**.

.@RonJohnsonWI & @ChuckGrassley letter to the OIG regarding the FBI's "failure to preserve" text messages from Strzok & Page. OIG first said they had the texts, now OIG doesn't have them? If it was a "glitch" why didn't OIG say anything in Dec. 2017 letter?https://t.co/3m5gfsjuac pic.twitter.com/nbOkfqSgPa

— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) January 24, 2018

The problem is that the FBI IG certified to the Senate in December that they had 100% of the Strzok/Page texts for the period November 30, 2016 to July 28, 2017.

So what happened? Did the IG simply not look at the text messages and just sent an affirmative reply to the Senate? Did the IG know the messages were missing and just assume that the Senate wouldn’t figure it out? Does the IG have the missing texts and have now decided to not produce them? And what explanation can they give when the FBI has nearly zero credibility?

If Jeff Sessions would stop worrying about legal pot in Colorado and spend a few minutes cleaning up what appears to be an egregious, to coin a term, shithole in the Hoover Building, we’d all be better off.