Robert Mueller’s investigators were unable to recover any work-related text messages that former Trump aide Steve Bannon sent and received on his personal cellphone prior to March 2017, according to the special counsel’s report released on Thursday.
Bannon told investigators that he “regularly used his personal Blackberry and personal email for work-related communications” but “took no steps to preserve these work communications,” according to the report.
Mueller’s team said the missing text messages prevented them from clarifying two conflicting accounts of a meeting between Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
[Also read: Jared Kushner used WhatsApp to conduct White House business]
Prince told investigators that he met with Bannon in mid-January 2017 and told Bannon about a meeting he had with Kirill Dmitriev, a Putin ally and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, in the Seychelles. Prince said he briefed Bannon on the Russian national’s background and told Bannon that Dmitriev wanted to set up a channel to the Trump administration.
Bannon denied Prince’s account, telling investigators that he met with Prince but never talked with him about Dmitriev or anyone associated with Putin.
“Bannon also stated that had Prince mentioned such a meeting [between Prince and Dmitriev], Bannon would have remembered it, and Bannon would have objected to such a meeting having taken place,” said the report.
According to investigators, Prince’s cellphone was also missing any text messages from before March 2017. Prince “denied deleting any messages but claimed he did not know why there were no messages on his device before March 2017,” said the report.
According to the report, phone records show that Prince sent Bannon two text messages from the Seychelles where he was meeting with Dmitriev, but they were unable to find the content of those messages.
