New reports show that the missing critical five months of text messages between the two top level FBI employees, one of which had to be transferred off of special counsel Robert Mueller's team after anti-Trump and pro-Clinton texts were revealed by the Office of the Inspector General, who has been running a year-long investigation into the actions of the FBI and DOJ during the Clinton private server/email investigation, have been recovered according to Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Via Breitbart we see Horowitz notified Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, to inform them of the recovery:
The OIG has been investigating this matter and, this week, succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017.
As has been reported previously, the "coincidence" of those specific five months of texts having gone missing, with dates ranging from shortly after the presidential election to the exact day Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel of the Russia investigation, was highly suspect to members of congressional oversight committees.
Previous text messages included references to "fixing" the Clinton investigation, a "secret society," which the MSM is claiming was a "joking" reference, but which Senator Ron Johnson says an "informant" has confirmed the existence of, and stating the whistleblower has also revealed "secret meetings off-site," of the referenced "society" of agents. Other high profile texts previously released from before the 2016 presidential election, spoke of an "insurance policy" in the event that Donald Trump won.
7 DAYS LATER, NAMES LEAKED FROM CLASSIFIED FOUR-PAGE HOUSE INTEL COMMITTEE MEMO
A quick update on the classified House Intelligence Committee memo which last week the committee voted, along party lines, to release to the full 435 members of congress, which led to a viral #ReleaseTheMemo campaign with Republican lawmakers insisting the American public should be allowed to view the memo, with Democrats publicly speaking out against allowing the public to see it.
For seven days we have seen Republican lawmakers going on television after viewing the four-page memo in a secured room due to it being classified, insisting the memo be released to the public, asserting the document "names names" but being very careful not detail those names, nor delve into the details of the memo because of its classified nature.
Seven days later, someone went to the far left liberal website The Daily Beast and leaked the names mentioned in the memo, which include former FBI director James Comey, who we just recently learned has retained the services of an attorney, which just happens to be the same man he admitted to leaking his memos to, stating he did so in order to have them "leaked" to the press to initiate a special counsel to be named for the Russia investigation.
The other two names contained in the still-classified memo, revealed to the Daily Beast, are FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Given the fact that the White House has expressed support for releasing the controversial memo, which Republicans claim highlights abuses of power within the FBI and DOJ, and FISA abuses, with the WH on record as saying they are all for "full transparency" in regards to the memo, it appears the release will occur sooner rather than later, and we find it highly coincidental that it was a liberal website the actual names were leaked to, written into the piece with obvious sympathy to the FBI, with statements like "morale in the bureau is 'sagging'." The article goes to say "Some officials could barely leave their houses to string up Christmas lights without being accosted by their neighbors about the bureau’s apparent troubles," while quoting a former FBI official as claiming Republican lawmakers asserting their was massive FISA abuses were nothing more than "conspiracy theorists."
The DOJ and the FBI in the meantime are fighting tooth and nail against the release of the memo to the general public before they get to see it, calling it "reckless" to release it without consulting the FBI and DOJ, which is especially amusing since House Republicans maintain the information contained within the four-page memo was compiled from the documentation provided to congress from those same two agencies.
Via The Daily Caller we see that David Nunes' office is hitting back against the DOJ and FBI's claims:
“Agencies that are under investigation by congressional committees don’t typically get access to the committees’ investigative documents about them, and it’s no surprise these agencies don’t want the abuses we’ve found to be made public,” Jack Langer said in a statement.
Political writer and analyst Andrew McCarthy hits the nail on the head here in regards to the "irony" of the DOJ and FBI whining that Congress isn't turning the memo over to them before releasing it to the public:
These executive-branch agencies did not cooperatively comply with congressional investigators; they stonewalled for five months. To this day they are stonewalling: Just this weekend, they belatedly fessed up that the FBI had failed to preserve five months’ worth of text messages — something they had to have known for months. An American who impeded a federal investigation the way federal investigators are impeding congressional investigations would swiftly find himself in legal jeopardy.
Moreover, it is not like the Justice Department and FBI did Nunes a favor and are thus in a position to impose conditions; Congress is entitled to the information it has sought in its oversight capacity. There is no Justice Department or FBI in the Constitution; while these agencies are part of the executive branch, they are creatures of statute. Congress created them, they are dependent on Congress for funding, and Congress has a constitutional obligation to perform oversight to ensure that the mission they are carrying out — with taxpayer support and under statutory restrictions — is being carried out appropriately.
Republicans tend to be favorably disposed toward law enforcement’s preferences. They would surely have preferred to have non-confrontational interactions with vital executive agencies led by Republican appointees of a Republican president. Indeed, most Republicans are puzzled by the lack of cooperation — by the failure of the White House to direct the president’s subordinates to comply with congressional requests for information about potential abuses of power carried out under the prior, Democratic administration.
This is a reciprocal business. If the Justice Department and FBI want accommodations, they have to exhibit cooperation — do the little things, like maybe remember that congressional subpoenas are lawful demands, not suggestions or pleas. On the record thus far, the committee has every reason to believe that submitting the Nunes memo for review by the Justice Department and FBI will result in more delay and foot-dragging. Clearly, there is a strategy to slow-walk compliance in hopes that events — such as, say, a midterm-election victory that returns the House to Democratic control — will abort congressional investigations of the investigators.
Another example of the FBI doing everything in its power to prevent public transparency is detailed by Byron York at the Washington Examiner. It appears that when the highly publicized criminal referral sent to the FBI and the DOJ by Senator Grassley and Senator Graham, against Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the Trump dossier, the public only got to see the cover letter because portions of the referral itself contained classified information.
The Senators then produced an unclassified version of the referral to offer the public their reasoning for the criminal referral against Steele. Then acting in good faith, they sent that unclassified version to the FBI to make sure everything that was stated within was unclassified, and according to Grassley, the FBI "falsely claimed," it wasn't. As Byron York says, that is the "Hide the Ball," game started.
That's when Grassley got the runaround. The FBI "falsely claimed" — Grassley's words — that a portion of the document was classified and thus held up release. The information was not classified, Grassley said — it was based on "non-government sources" and "the deputy attorney general has discussed the fact at issue with me more than once in an unsecure space and on an unsecure phone line."
"Unfortunately, I suspect something else is really going on here," Grassley said. "It sure looks like a bureaucratic game of hide the ball, rather than a genuine concern about national security."
Grassley and Graham's referral remains in FBI limbo — and the public remains in the dark about what it reveals.
WHY ARE THE ROGUE AGENTS STILL EMPLOYED?
This is a question I have thought and I have seen readers ask, here at ANP and elsewhere on social media, in forums and in comment sections. There are a number of Obama holdovers, but more importantly members of both the DOJ and the FBI that have been at the respective agencies throughout multiple presidents and separating those doing their jobs, from those that have basically gone rogue as the texts between Strzok and Page indicate they have, is basically determining not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
So what about those that have been proven to have a clear bias, and spoke about "fixing" the Clinton investigation, or an "insurance policy" against a possible Trump win in the 2016 presidential election, among the other damaging statements revealed to date?
Former SS agent Dan Bongino offers one possible answer to why they have not been cut loose from the agency pending an investigation, where he poses the following theory: "It’s highly likely the corrupted FBI officials involved in the spying scandal on Donald Trump haven’t been fired because the information they have is devastating and the FBI is panicked about losing administrative control over them."
If he is correct, then there are other top level officials that need to be weeded out of the FBI and the DOJ, which is one possible reason the Democrats, the DOJ and the FBI are fighting so hard against the release of the House Intel Committee memo, because two of the names that were leaked to the Daily Beast are still employed.
According to Paul Sperry, former D.C. bureau chief for Investor's Business Daily, "In addition to Strzok and Page's texts, IG Horowitz has obtained hundreds of other high-level text messages from the FBI-issued mobile devices of other FBI as well DOJ officials involved in pre-election investigations. May explain recent resignations and reassignments."
