It was the most damaging of all the damaging texts exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. On Aug. 8, 2016, in the second week of the Trump-Russia investigation on which both were working, Page texted Strzok to say, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
The Justice Department gave Congress Page’s “not ever going to become president” text months ago, when it produced thousands of texts to Hill investigators. But lawmakers — and the public — did not learn of the explosive second part of the exchange — Strzok’s “We’ll stop it” answer — until last Thursday, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton email investigation was released. The newly-revealed text was devastating on its face. But it also raised eyebrows among Republicans who immediately asked why it had been not been turned over to lawmakers months ago.
“Why wasn’t that given to Congress?” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked on Fox News the day the Horowitz report was released. “Why did I find out about that today at noon?”
Turns out there was more to the story. Horowitz didn’t know about the text, either — for quite a long time. The Justice Department failed to turn it over to him, and he didn’t discover it on his own until the investigation was nearly over. At hearings before the House and Senate this week, Horowitz told how he found the text, and while he pointed no fingers, his account raised questions about the Justice Department’s actions.
At the Senate hearing Monday, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah., asked Horowitz how he got the text. The inspector general explained that the FBI first turned over tens of thousands of texts, gathered by the bureau’s internal data collection and preservation software. But then it was discovered that there was a period — roughly from mid-December 2016 to mid-May 2017 — when there were no texts at all.
That was, it hardly needs be said, an extremely important time in the Trump-Russia investigation.
There had been a flaw in the FBI’s collection system, Horowitz said. Searching for the missing texts, Horowitz took possession of Strzok’s and Page’s phones and “undertook a series of steps to seek to exploit, to extract the missing text messages from the phones.”
It wasn’t easy. First, the IG’s office used its own resources to try to recover the missing texts. That was partially successful. Then it went to an outside contractor, who provided some “additional tools” to perform a “second extraction.” That picked up more texts.
The IG’s office then went to the Department of Defense, and “they gave us those tools and we used that and extracted more text messages,” Horowitz said.
Finally, Horowitz’s staff went back to the FBI and did a final search — this was just a few weeks ago, in May — and discovered that the phone itself “had a database on it that was actually also doing a collection of text messages.”
Using that method, on their fourth run through the data, the IG staff discovered the “We’ll stop it” text from Aug. 8, 2016. “It turned out that the FBI wasn’t aware that that database on there, which was supposed to be an operating function, was actually collecting data,” Horowitz said.
But there was something odd about it all. The Strzok “We’ll stop it” text did not come from that period of time, December 2016 to May 2017, when the FBI system was not working. It came from August 2016, when the FBI system was supposedly collecting every message. That was the period of time from which the FBI originally turned over tens of thousands of Strzok-Page texts.
And yet, that one-line message — “We’ll stop it” — was not turned over to the IG, and not turned over to Congress, either.
“It’s now clear to us that the — even when the software at the FBI was collecting text messages, because the August 8th period was within the collection period, we had the incoming Page to Strzok text, we didn’t have the response,” Horowitz told the Senate. “It’s now clear to us that even outside this blackout period, we’re not convinced that the FBI was collecting, for obvious reasons, 100 percent of the text messages.”
On Tuesday, speaking to the House, Horowitz faced some skeptical questioning. There were reams of Strzok-Page texts turned over to Congress last fall, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said to Horowitz, “But there was one we didn’t get to see — one text message we didn’t get to see that — until last week, when your report came out, and it just happened to be the most explosive one, the one that says, ‘We’ll stop Trump.’ How come we didn’t see that beforehand?”
“There was, in that fourth recovery that we made in May, there was 100,000-plus lines of text to go through,” Horowitz said. “Most — all of them we’d found before. This one was one we hadn’t. We didn’t see it, or pick it up, until June.”
“Did you not see it, or was it hidden from you?” Jordan asked. “Because we have the text message right before it, and the one that happened right after it, but somehow that one — the most explosive one — was missing from the pages that we got months ago.”
Horowitz said he did not believe the Justice Department knew about the text before the IG’s office discovered it. “I don’t think the department had it,” Horowitz said. But any chance for Horowitz to elaborate on that, or to satisfy Republican suspicions about the Justice Department’s role, was lost when Jordan’s time ran out, and no one picked up his line of questions.
Horowitz said he will issue a separate report on the technology employed in uncovering the texts. But for now, the public doesn’t really know what went on, and why the Justice Department failed to turn over the one text that made all the difference in the case of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
[Also read: Trump wraps ‘sick loser’ Peter Strzok into ‘witch hunt’ mix with ‘discredited Mueller team’ and ‘slippery’ Comey]
