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.
…….
- Discussion
-
No evidence FBI tried to destroy Peter Strzok or Lisa Page texts, IG report finds https://t.co/LaYiYY28bf
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 14, 2018
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.