S*******i 发帖数: 2018 | 1 http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-missing-texts-1516667245
The Justice Department has dropped a second tranche of text exchanges
between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page —conveniently delivering them
to the Senate at the start of last Friday night’s government shutdown.
Investigators are still plowing through the 384 pages, but preliminary
findings raise new questions about FBI political maneuvering during the 2016
election.
Among the biggest news is what wasn’t in the Friday delivery: The FBI
claims to have “failed” to capture text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms
. Page between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017. This period coincides
with the height of the FBI’s investigation into possible Trump-Russia
collusion, on which Mr. Strzok was a lead investigator. The FBI is blaming
this five-month missing link on “misconfiguration issues related to
rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades.”
These are the folks tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton’s missing
emails. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Chairman Ron Johnson on Saturday wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray
asking how many other FBI records were lost. Imagine how Mr. Wray’s agents
would treat a private individual’s failure to turn over comparable records.
Mr. Johnson’s letter also revealed more reason to believe the FBI’s probe
into Mrs. Clinton’s email server may have included political calculations.
Congress already knows through internal memos that the FBI watered down the
language in Mr. Comey’s July 2016 Clinton exoneration statement—from the
legally culpable “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”
But the latest texts show the FBI also eliminated evidence that Mrs. Clinton
compromised high-level communications. A June 30, 2016 draft of Mr. Comey’
s statement noted that Mrs. Clinton had engaged in “an email exchange with
[President Obama ]” via her private server while on the “territory of
sophisticated adversaries.” That same afternoon, Mr. Strzok texts Ms. Page
to tell her that, in fact, senior officials had decided to water down the
reference to President Obama to “another senior government official.” By
the time Mr. Comey gave his public statement on July 5, both references—to
Mr. Obama and to “another senior government official”—had disappeared.
And while Mr. Comey made much in his statement about how he had “not
coordinated or reviewed [his] statement in any way with the Department of
Justice or any other part of the government,” the Strzok-Page texts
indicate otherwise. On July 1, 2016, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
announced she would remove herself from any decision to prosecute Mr.
Clinton and accept the FBI’s judgment. In a text that day, Mr. Strzok
complains about her statement and notes that Mrs. Lynch is hardly “a real
profile in couragw (sic), since she knows no charges will be brought.” This
is the day before the FBI interviewed Mrs. Clinton.
All of this should be troubling to Americans who admire the FBI and want it
to be above politics. The vanishing texts and partisan texting are more
reasons for Congress to share all it knows about the FBI and the 2016
campaign with the public. |
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