"You don’t have the fox guard the chicken house.”

The Federalist reports that the judge who presided over Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, and then mysteriously recused himself, was friends with Peter Strzok. Strzok and Page conspired to arrange dinner parties where they could talk to the judge without alerting others to their scheme. Mollie Hemingway reports,

The text messages about Contreras between controversial Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lawyer Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the senior FBI counterintelligence official who was kicked off Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, were deliberately hidden from Congress, multiple congressional investigators told The Federalist. In the messages, Page and Strzok, who are rumored to have been engaged in an illicit romantic affair, discussed Strzok’s personal friendship with Contreras and how to leverage that relationship in ongoing counterintelligence matters.

…The pair even schemed about how to set up a cocktail or dinner party just so Contreras, Strzok, and Page could speak without arousing suspicion that they were colluding. Strzok expressed concern that a one-on-one meeting between the two men might require Contreras’ recusal from matters in which Strzok was involved.

“[REDACTED] suggested a social setting with others would probably be better than a one on one meeting,” Strzok told Page. “I’m sorry, I’m just going to have to invite you to that cocktail party.”

…The pre-existing relationship between Strzok and Contreras and Contreras’ mysterious recusal from the Flynn case, forced or otherwise, raise serious questions about whether Flynn’s case, among others, was properly conducted.

The text messages that show Page and Strzok conspiring to meet with Contreras were originally hidden from Congress. In records provided by DOJ to Congress, the exchanges referencing Contreras, and plans to meet with him under the guise of a cocktail party, were completely redacted by federal law enforcement officials. The exchanges obtained by The Federalist include information that was never turned over to Congress.

Congressional investigators told The Federalist that only 3,162 of the more than 1.2 million documents retained by the DOJ Inspector General (IG) have been turned over to the committees specifically tasked with oversight of the Department of Justice and FBI.

Ongoing DOJ obstruction of congressional oversight has only increased the calls for a special counsel to investigate criminal leaks, federal surveillance abuses, and other alleged improprieties within the agencies. On Thursday, Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to name a special prosecutor to work independently with the IG to investigate the law enforcement agencies.

“They cannot be counted on to investigate themselves,” Grassley said in an interview. “If you do something wrong, you don’t have the fox guard the chicken house.”

Sessions has not yet publicly said how he plans to tackle the problems in his department.

Read more here.