Photo: IG Report Contains Anti-Trump Texts Missing from Other DOJ Docs
Text messages that were part of the Department of Justice Inspector General report released Thursday had not been turned over to Congress earlier, for reasons that remain unknown.
One of the text messages appears to show that FBI agent Peter Strzok promised that he would help prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. But the message is conspicuously missing from a batch of thousands of texts that had already been provided to Congress.
A Justice Department spokesperson was unable to say why the message, which was sent on Aug. 9, 2016, was missing from the previous document productions.
The inspector general recovered the message along with thousands of others as part of its investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The investigation led to the discovery of politically charged comments between Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, both of whom worked on the Clinton probe and the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The new messages were recovered in May. The office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was told about the two messages on June 8, according to a Justice Department letter sent to Congress on Thursday.
One of the newly recovered text messages reportedly shows that Strzok told Page that “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president.
“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok in an Aug. 9, 2016, text message.
“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” Strzok replied, according to Bloomberg News, which obtained a summary of the inspector general’s report.
Page’s initial message is included in a batch of thousands of texts that have already been provided to Congress.
Strzok’s response, however, is missing from that batch of messages.
A Justice Department official told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the office of the inspector general recovered the text messages using its own equipment rather than the FBI’s.
The FBI has acknowledged that it was unable to recover tens of thousands of texts between Page and Strzok from Dec. 13, 2016, to May 17, 2017, due to a technical glitch. Some of those messages were recovered and given to Congress.
The missing Strzok text cited in the inspector general’s report was sent well before the glitch affected FBI servers.
The Justice Department official was not sure whether the Strzok text was deleted or whether it was missing due to other technical issues.
Strzok’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
A version of this article appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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