More Questions About The Strzok-Page Texts

There are several continuing questions about the text and e-mail messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that were exchanged on FBI computers as they conducted a torrid affair. For starters, the texts, which were sent over a period between August 2015 abd sometime in mid-2017, weren't released until the affair became public on December 13, 2017. In hindsight, this revelation, or series of revelations, appears to have been carefully managed.

A series of text messages exchanged between top FBI employees referring to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as an “idiot” and “d*uche,” while fearing his potential victory as “terrifying,” were released to lawmakers Tuesday evening on Capitol Hill amid increasing demands to see them, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

Earlier this month, reports surfaced that special counsel Robert Mueller had removed Peter Strzok, one of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence experts, from his team after an internal investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered politically tinged messages exchanged with FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Throughout the primary season in 2016, Strzok and Page appeared to dread a Trump victory, according to the messages reviewed by CNN.

. . . Page was also briefly on Mueller’s team before returning to the FBI, but she completed her detail before the special counsel’s office was made aware of the texts.

The roughly 375 text messages disclosed Tuesday span from August 2015 through early December 2016, though the inspector general’s probe of the entire situation remains ongoing.

In addition, Strzok and Page exchanged an estimated 50,000 texts and e-mails over the entire course of their affair. This amounts to about 75 texts or e-mails per day, weekends and holidays included, over 22 months. Something's really out of kilter here, teen romance on steroids -- you've got to ask what was wrong with this pair down deep. In addition, of the roughly 50,000 total, far fewer have ever been released, most in a few tranches from December 2017 to early 20l8.

As I noted yesterday, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who had been aware of the affair by December 2016 but took no official action, did remove Strzok from the Mueller investigation in July 2017 once he learned of the texts and e-mails. However, this was not made public until the texts and e-mails were made public that December.

But that's not the end of this story. Once the FBI began dribbling out small excerpts from the enormous total, it emerged that five full months worth were missing entirely:

The FBI is missing five months of text messages between two senior officials who Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused of political bias, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed in a letter to the bureau made public on Sunday.

Republicans have been scrutinizing the text messages between senior counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page as part of their inquiry into whether bias infected the bureau’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state and into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

. . . Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a top House conservative who has been among the most aggressive critics of FBI leadership, pointed to the missing texts as a reason for a new special counsel to examine the FBI investigation.

Members of Congress were previously provided with hundreds of pages of their texts, but they learned last week that texts from Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 were missing. In a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Inspector General Michael Horowitz said Thursday that forensic tools have been able to recover some of those texts and efforts find others are still underway.

. . . Sen. Johnson released additional messages Wednesday, including some in which Strzok appears reticent to join Mueller’s team and doubtful that it will uncover anything. Johnson and others have also suggested a post-election text referring to forming a “secret society” was evidence of a plot against Trump, but Johnson acknowledged Thursday it may have just been a joke.

Much of the texts' content was both cryptic and banal, but a few, like the "insurance policy" text I discussed yesterday and another that referred to an apparent FBI "secret society", have consistently been dismissed as jokes:

Lawmakers have refused to publicly release the full text message, sent the day after Trump won the 2016 presidential election. But ABC News has obtained a copy of the one message that Republicans appear to be citing, and it's unclear if the message's reference to a “secret society” may have been made in jest.

"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society," FBI lawyer Lisa Page wrote to senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was working on the FBI’s probe of Russian meddling in the presidential election and would later join Page for a brief period on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team.

.. . On Friday, the Justice Department handed the Senate Homeland Security Committee and other committees a new batch of more than 1,000 messages sent between Strzok and Page. The messages newly obtained by ABC News were in that set.

Asked Wednesday whether he believes there’s a "secret society" inside the FBI to take down the president, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said, "That's Strzok and Page’s term."

"Everything I take with a grain of salt," he added. "[But] I've heard from an individual that ... there was a group of managers within the FBI that were holding meetings off site."

So "when Strzok and Page had described a secret society, that didn't surprise me because I had corroborating information," Johnson said.

It's worth pointing out that Justice Department Inpector General Michael Horowitz, who was responsible for finding the Strzok-Page texts, was notably not among those whom Trump fired when he returned to office.

Wikipedia has an entry for the FBI secret society conspiracy theory that concludes,

Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter summed up the situation as follows: Other than misusing their government-issued phones, neither Strzok or Page broke the law. Most likely they communicated on their work phones to hide their affair from their spouses and were not plotting against Trump. He said, "They’re making a big whoopty-do about nothing. . . . If they had been using their personal phones to talk about Trump, they would have been perfectly in their right to do so. . . . Congress shouldn’t be wasting our money looking through the texts of these bozos. The only people whose time it’s worth going through their texts are divorce attorneys on behalf of their spouses."

For starters, Strzok and Page weren't using their personal phones to talk about Trump, they used FBI phones to conduct their affair and sent an astonishing 50,000 messages to do it. This would be grounds for termination in just about any normal organization, government or private sector. It also raises serious questions about their mental balance, anti-Trump or no -- but this pair was in charge of extremely sensitive matters requiring a great deal of trust and judgment.

In additiion, how and why the e-mails between December 2016 and May 2017 -- a period that includes key Obama White House meetings, the Michael Flynn affair, and Trump's firing James Comey -- went missing is a question worth asking, and if anything deliberate was done to make them go missing, it raises the real possibility of obsruction of justice. These are issues that go well beyond divorce court, although Page and her then-husband did divorce in 2023, while Strzok appears to be still married to his wife.