The Department of Justice’s recovery of some of the missing text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page has begun, according to Fox News’s Sean Hannity, citing DOJ sources.
Five months’ worth of text messages between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 were found to be missing by federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the gap on technical problems with their cellphones over “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed Monday to investigate the missing texts.
“We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source,” he said in a statement. “If we are successful, we will update the congressional committees immediately.”
Hannity said sources at the DOJ told him they have begun to recover some of the texts from that time period. Specific content from those texts has not been released.
The missing messages have caused problems for the Justice Department inspector general's office.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have sent a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz noting that the IG's office said on Dec. 13 that it had all the messages between Strzok and Page between Nov. 30, 2016, and July 28, 2017.
Lawmakers later learned of the five-month gap.
The lawmakers said they wanted the IG's office to "reconcile" those two points. (Fox News)
The missing texts cover events from the presidential transition to the start of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.