An FBI agent who ended up on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team told a woman he was having an extramarital affair with that he didn’t want to join the probe because his gut told him ‘there’s no big there there.’
Peter Strzok, the deputy assistant director of counterintelligence, told fellow FBI agent Lisa Page in texts that he had been asked to be part of Mueller’s team but he wasn’t sure he’d accept the invitation.
‘You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern, there’s no big “there” there,’ he told her in May 19 a message the FBI turned over to Congress.
Peter Strzok, the deputy assistant director of counterintelligence, told fellow FBI agent Lisa Page in texts that he had been asked to be part of Mueller’s team but he wasn’t sure he’d accept the invitation, I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern, there’s no big “there” there,’ he said
Lawmakers also revealed on Monday a conversation in which Strzok and Page discussed deleting their text exchanges. Five months of messages later went missing.
In messages that were previously revealed the pair derided President Donald Trump and talked about taking out an ‘insurance policy’ in case he was elected.
New messages provided to Congress last Friday revealed their chatter immediately after the election about forming a ‘secret society’ and referred to ‘Our task’ with a capital O.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson read aloud the exchange about Mueller’s investigation Tuesday on a radio show. Copies of the exchange that came two days after Mueller was appointed were obtained by the Daily Caller.
Johnson told Milwaukee radio host Jay Weber on Tuesday that the message was ‘jaw-dropping’ considering their previous conversations about Trump.
Even ‘the man who had a plan to do something because he just couldn’t abide Donald Trump being president’ had a sense there’s no there there, he said.
‘I think that’s kind of jaw-dropping,’ he said. ‘And look at what this nation’s been put through as a result.’
Without seeing the rest of text, it’s just smoke, Johnson said, noting that legislators would need to see the rest of the texts to connect the dots.
‘They are purposefully it seems like evading, putting some of these work-related messages on a platform that is untraceable,’ he said. ‘It looks like they’re mishandling those federal records.’
He made similar comments on Brian Kilmeade’s radio show.
‘We have just been dragged through months of this special counsel and the FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Counter-Intelligence Division is saying two days after Mueller has been appointed, his gut sense is there is no big there there… it really is pretty jaw dropping.’
The FBI officials were revealed Monday to have talked about forming a ‘secret society’ the day after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by two members of Congress.
In an appearance on ‘The Story with Martha MacCallum,’ Rep. Trey Gowdy said, ‘The day after the election, what they really didn’t want to have happen, there is a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these supposed to be objective, fact-centric FBI agents saying, “Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.”
‘So of course I’m going to want to know what secret society you are talking about, because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the electoral college. So yeah — I’m going to want to know.’
In an appearance on ‘The Story with Martha MacCallum,’ Rep. Trey Gowdy said the two agents also discussed deleting their text message history. Five months of their conversations later went missing
Standing beside Gowdy in the joint interview was Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, who the first of the two Republican legislators to mention it.
‘We learned today about information that after, in the immediate aftermath of his election, that there may have been a “secret society” of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI, to include Page and Strzok, that would be working against him,’ Ratcliffe said.
He added, ‘I’m not saying that actually happened, but when folks speak in those terms, they need to come forward to explain the context with which they used those terms.’
The Justice Department turned over copies of the communications last week. But it revealed a critical gap in messages between Strzok, a counterintelligence agent who worked on Hillary Clinton’s email case, and Page, an agent who worked with Strzok for a time on the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, as it did.
Texts the pair sent each other between December 14, 2017 and May 17, 2017 are missing, the department said.
President Donald Trump put the spotlight Tuesday back on the two FBI officials who disparaged him in text messages prior to the presidential election and whom he’d previously accused of ‘treason,’ this morning
President Donald Trump put the spotlight back on the FBI officials, whom he’d previously accused of ‘treason,’ on Tuesday over the lapse.
‘In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI now says it is missing five months worth of lovers Strzok-Page texts, perhaps 50,000, and all in prime time. Wow!’ he tweeted.
Justice has blamed a glitch in its record-keeping system for the blackout.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that Justice is taking all available actions to recover the missing messages.
Ratcliffe told MacCallum ‘perhaps they really were lost’ but called it a ‘strange coincidence.’
‘The problem, Martha, is..it makes it harder and harder for us to explain away one really strange coincidence after another.’
Gowdy, the House Oversight chairman, said in the interview that ‘either the bureau needs to find them’ or ‘we need to have someone who has really easy access to these text messages, and it may be law enforcement.’
‘What Johnny and I saw today was a text about not keeping texts,’ he offered. ‘We saw more manifest bias against President Trump all the way through the election into transition.’
Not including the missing communications, Fox News reported, the FBI has over 50,000 texts that Strzok, who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team when the original messages were unearthed, and Page, who had already left the investigation, sent to one another.
Those messages are expected to be made public by Congress, CBS reported.
Previously published texts show Strzok suggesting the bureau invest in an ‘insurance policy’ in case Trump is elected.
‘I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration…that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,’ he told Page in an August 2016 text.’
Lawmakers said Monday that they were shocked by the incomplete record-keeping. The messages from the period of time that was wiped covers the end of the transition to the time that Mueller was tasked with leading a special probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
On Fox, Ratcliffe said of the controversy, ‘We know that Strzok and Page had an intense anti-Trump bias. And that’s OK, so long as they check it at the door and do their job. But we learned today in the thousands of text messages we reviewed, that perhaps they may not have done that.
‘We know about this “insurance policy” that was referenced in trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’
A letter from Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Stephen Boyd to Johnson on Friday said that the Department of Justice had learned ‘that many FBI-provided Samsung 5 mobile devices did not capture or store text messages.’
The bureau told DOJ that messages were not retained ‘due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.’
DOJ’s explanation of how the messages disappeared had Republican lawmakers fuming.
‘Unreal. We’ve been asking for the remaining text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents (and former Mueller team members), Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The FBI now says the texts are “missing,” ‘ Rep. Mark Meadows, leader of a group of conservatives known as the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted. ‘If it wasn’t already clear we need a second special counsel, it’s abundantly clear now’.
Flabbergasted, Meadows told Fox, ‘They’re supposed to be out tracking terrorism and we can’t even find our own text messages?’
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that Justice is taking all available actions to recover the missing messages.
Sessions told congressional committees on Friday that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General is looking into the matter.
‘[A] review is already underway to ascertain what occurred and to determine if these records can be recovered in any other way,’ he said. ‘If any wrongdoing were to be found to have caused this gap, appropriate legal disciplinary action measures will be taken.’
Prior to the revelation that the FBI was missing the large volume of communications, President Trump had Strzok and Page in a Wall Street Journal interview and accused them of ‘treason’ for the way they spoke about him before the election.
‘There was no collusion on our side, the collusion was on the Democrat side with the Russians. And what went on with the FBI, where a man is tweeting to his lover that if she loses, we’ll essentially go back to the—we’ll go to the insurance policy, which is—if they lose, we’ll go to phase 2, and we’ll get this guy out of office.
‘I mean, this is the FBI we’re talking about. I think that is—that is treason. See, that’s treason right there,’ he stated.
In December, after Strozk was removed from the special counsel probe because of the text messages, Trump said the FBI’s reputation was in ‘tatters’ because of mismanagement under James Comey, the former director of the bureau the president fired in May.
‘But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness,’ he pledged.