Leave it to the federal government to have to jump through hoops to uncover information on devices that a government agency gives to their own employees. That’s like any office IT department having to consult outside sources to discover which employees are spending too much time on fantasy football and not enough time on their work.
Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday that investigators had to go through several steps in order to uncover politically-biased text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
The text messages in question were contained in Strzok and Page’s FBI-issued cell phones, and—according to Horowitz—his cyber forensics team did their due-diligence in attempting to extract as many text messages as possible. However, there was a particular text exchange from both Page and Strzok that revealed their political bias:
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page said in a text to Strzok.
“No,” Strzok responded. “No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
Sixteen words. Sixteen words is all it took to uncover that there very well might have been an effort—no matter the size—to discredit and hurt President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
According to the Daily Caller:
Republicans have pointed to the text message as evidence of political bias on the part of Strzok, who worked for several months on the special counsel’s Russia investigation. The OIG report said that the text message showed that Strzok “of a biased state of mind” and implied “a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.”
Strzok’s response to Page is conspicuously absent from previous batches of text messages given to Congress. Page’s question to Strzok was included in those earlier releases.
What’s that? You mean people trying to take down a future U.S. president made it difficult to uncover an incriminating text message that would make the Russian collusion case look like peanuts? You don’t say?!
Aaaaaaaand to no one’s surprise, FBI Director Christopher Wray didn’t have much to say when questioned during the committee hearing by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas):