Jan. 25 (UPI) — The Department of Justice’s Inspector General on Thursday said the agency recovered missing text messages between two FBI employees involved in the investigations of Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump.
The recovered text messages were missing from a batch of texts between senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page that were requested by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.
The recovered text messages were sent between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. Inspector General Michael Horowitz did not publicly release the text messages and said an investigation to recover any additional text messages was ongoing.
On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released text messages between Strzok and Page that he said “raise serious concerns about the impartiality of senior leadership running both the Clinton and Trump investigations.”
In one of those text messages, Page appeared to be wary of repercussions from investigating Clinton if Clinton won the presidency.
“One more thing: she might be our next president,” Page wrote. “The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?”
“Agreed,” Strzok replied. “I called Bill and relayed what we discussed. He agrees. I will email you and [redacted] same.”
Senate Republicans say the text messages between Strzok and Page are crucial to understanding if any impropriety occurred during the investigation into Clinton’s handling of emails during her time as secretary of state.
Both Strzok and Page were on the FBI team for that investigation and both expressed pro-Trump and anti-Clinton views during the 2016 election. And before the text messages were released in July, Strzok, one of the FBI’s top investigators, was appointed to investigate the possibility of Russian collusion in the 2016 election. He was then taken off the case.
