Ooops. The FBI Can’t Find Five Months Of Critical Text Messages

Most everyone is familiar with the saga of FBI agent and lothario Peter Strzok, his paramour Lisa Page, their politically charged text messages, and the ominous promise of an “insurance policy” waiting in the wings just in case tired, sick, corrupt Hillary couldn’t win the election. The FBI turned over some 10,000 text messages between the two that were sent/received from their government issued phones. But that isn’t the end of the story. They turned over more documents on Friday and along with the documents, this:

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC.

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

“The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,” Boyd wrote.

If this sounds a lot like the IRS and Lois Lerner, it’s because it is a lot like the IRS an Lois Lerner.

What is included in this five month gap? Strzok being assigned to interview Mike Flynn. James Comey leaking memos to try to set up the need for a special counsel. Lots of leaks that seemed to come from the FBI. Comey’s firing. Andrew McCabe, in whose office Strzok and Page discussed politics, becoming acting FBI director. In short, anything that would bear on one of the key questions being looked at by at least two Congressional committees, that is, the use of the Trump dossier by the FBI, will not be covered.

Nothing at all suspicious and deep-statey about this. Nope. Not a thing.

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