In an interview with Fox News’s Martha MacCallum on Monday night, Reps. Trey Gowdy and John Ratcliffe revealed new details about the text messages between two FBI agents who were kicked off the ongoing investigation into Donald Trump for bias likely to affect their handling of the case.
The FBI provided members of Congress with nearly 400 pages of these text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents removed, after months on the job, from the ongoing Russia probe. That is investigating whether Trump and his campaign associates colluded with Russian officials to sway the 2016 election. Officials discovered anti-Trump messages between the two.
Strzok and Page, who were allegedly having an affair with each other, left or were removed from the Robert Mueller probe in the summer of 2017. Printouts of text messages between these two from August 2015 to December 2016 were given to members of Congress Friday evening, according to a letter by Sen. Ron Johnson. Text messages between the two from December 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 were reportedly lost due to a technical glitch on the FBI’s part.
“The loss of records from this period is concerning because it is apparent from other records that Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page communicated frequently about the investigation,” Johnson wrote.
Gowdy said the explanation for the missing text messages may be fishier than the official explanation, saying he saw Strzok and Page discuss getting rid of texts in a printout of the messages he and other members of Congress received last week.
“Lay aside this glaring five-month gap in text that the world’s premier agency somehow missed” the bias of these agents, Gowdy began. “What Johnny and I saw today was a text about not keeping texts. We saw more manifest bias against President Trump all the way through the election into transition.”
“It’s a strange coincidence,” Ratcliffe said. “It’s possible these these messages that were missing, perhaps it is a strange coincidence.”
“It makes it harder and harder to explain one strange coincidence after another,” he said.
