No evidence FBI tried to destroy Peter Strzok or Lisa Page texts, IG report finds – Washington Examiner

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The FBI did not intentionally delete anti-President Trump text messages exchanged by two former employees at the center of a congressional investigation into potential bias at the bureau.

The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General released a report Thursday in which it cleared the FBI of deliberately destroying texts sent between former special agent Peter Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who were both involved in the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and, briefly, special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia inquiry. The OIG investigation was initiated after it was revealed thousands of messages sent from December 2016, shortly after Trump’s election win, and May 2017 via their government-issued phones were missing.

Investigators instead blamed the FBI’s automated application that wirelessly gathers and saves data to and from its mobile devices. They found that the software, as of last month, was still not working “in approximately 10 percent” of the bureau’s phones that are in service.

“The OIG investigation determined the FBI’s collection tool was not only failing to collect any data on certain phones during particularly periods of time, it also does not appear that it was collecting all text messages even when it was generally functioning to collect text messages,” the report states.

The FBI welcomed the OIG’s findings Thursday.

“As noted by the OIG, because of the level of sophistication and access that would be required, it was unlikely that Ms. Page or Mr. Strzok attempted to circumvent the FBI’s text message collection capabilities; and, the OIG found no evidence that they did,” the bureau wrote in response to the report.

The missing texts between Strzok and Page, who were having an extramarital affair at the time, were eventually recovered by investigators. One of their messages, sent in August 2016, suggested they would “stop” Trump seizing the White House. Their exchanges were later scrutinized by lawmakers on Capitol Hill — primarily House Republicans — concerned with the appearance of bias on the part of the FBI staffers, but the OIG found in June the FBI’s Clinton probe was not swayed by improper motivations.

Strzok was fired from the FBI in August. Page resigned in May.

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