FBI loses swamp scandal texts. Nothing to see, move along there

Ok, this is all getting completely out of hand. Here are some more amazing developments in the Washington swamp of which you may be unaware if you rely on the mainstream media.

To recap. Last year saw revelations about FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The significance was this. Strzok, when deputy chief of counterintelligence, oversaw the Trump investigation when it was opened in July 2016 and had previously been a top investigator on the Clinton email probe.

Both Strzok and Page worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation until July 2017. Strzok was removed after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered text messages he exchanged with Page with whom he was having an affair. In these exchanges, Strzok spoke insultingly about Trump. In another, he referred cryptically to an “insurance policy” that the FBI sought to take out in case Trump defeated Clinton in the election.

Now read on – and hold onto your jaw as it drops to the floor.

The Justice Department has told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a letter that the FBI has LOST five months of email messages between the pair.

The letter states: “The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page.” he failure was put down to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities. The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,

The FBI couldn’t get its “rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades” sorted? Yeah, right. I mean, it’s only the FBI. You don’t expect them to have mastered digital technology, do you?

And the FBI can’t find a way of retrieving these texts, even though as we all know texts tend to leave a trail that’s still traceable especially for such smart guys as the FBI? Apparently not.

And the period covered by these missing texts, December 14 2016 to May 17 2017, isn’t of the slightest significance, is it? Ha. The Daily Caller observes that this was a key period of the Russia probe.

“During that time frame is when the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed News, when Strzok participated in a Jan. 24 interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, and when James Comey was fired as FBI director.

“The end date of the missing Strzok-Page texts is also significant. That’s because May 17 is the day when Mueller was appointed to take over the FBI’s probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

“The loss of records from this period is concerning,” the committee chairman Sen Ron Johnson wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

You can say that again.