FBI Destroyed Messages From Peter Strzok's iPhone; OIG Recovers 19,000 New "FBI Lovebird" Texts

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-15/mueller-scrubbed-messages-peter-strzoks-iphone-oig-recovers-19000-new-fbi-lovebird

The Justice Department's internal watchdog revealed on Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller's office scrubbed all of the data from FBI agent Peter Strzok's iPhone, while his FBI mistress Lisa Page's phone had been scrubbed by a different department, according to a comprehensive report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released on Thursday.

After Strzok was kicked off the special counsel investigation following the discovery of anti-Trump text messages between he and Page, his Mueller's Records Officer scrubbed Strzok's iPhone after determining "it contained no substantive text messages," reports the Conservative Review's Jordan Schachtel.

Mueller's team was unable to locate Page's iPhone, however the DOJ's Justice Management Division (JMD) similarly scrubbed her phone - resetting it to factory settings.

You got a source better than ZeroHedge? The reputable sources I found on this are full of excerpts like the following:

The Justice Department's watchdog has found no evidence the FBI intentionally destroyed text messages of two former FBI officials involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Instead, the inspector general in a report on Thursday faulted an FBI-wide software failure that has resulted in large portions of FBI text messages not being archived.

The report examined a gap in messages from December 2016 through May 2017 from the phones of former FBI agent Peter Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The FBI ultimately managed to recover thousands of the messages.

@mattbbpl:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/watchdog-no-evidence-fbi-tried-to-destroy-text-messages/2018/12/13/a556a1c0-fef4-11e8-a17e-162b712e8fc2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0289122c8407

So there is no conclusive evidence that the FBI intentionally deleted the messages, but if this had been anyone under Trump, ask yourself what you would think then.

But as long as there is no ironclad evidence, FBI is presumed innocent.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/370122-another-software-upgrade-suppressing-evidence-is-fbi-standard-procedure

Congressional investigators were rocked this weekend when the FBI notified them that five months of text messages from a top FBI investigator into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections had mysteriously vanished.

The FBI-issued cell phone of Peter Strzok, whose previous texts to his mistress (also an FBI employee) showed fierce hostility to Trump, suddenly had problems due to “software upgrades” and other issues — and voila — all the messages between the two from Dec. 14, 2016, to May 17, 2017 vanished. Strzok, who oversaw the Trump investigation from its start in July 2016, was removed from Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation last summer after the Justice Department Inspector General discovered his anti-Trump texts.

The FBI has a long history of “losing” evidence that would tarnish its halo. And for most of the agency’s history, judges and Congress have let the FBI sweep its dirt under the rug.

In the Ruby Ridge case, when an FBI sniper gunned down an Idaho mother holding her baby in 1992, the chief of the FBI’s Violence Crimes division was sent to prison for destroying evidence. When a Senate committee held hearings three years later, four FBI agents took the Fifth Amendment rather than tell the incriminating truth about their activities on the Ruby Ridge case. A subsequent Senate report concluded that the five successive FBI reports of internal investigations of the episode "are variously contradictory, inaccurate, and biased. They demonstrate a reluctance on the part of the FBI initially to take the incidents at Ruby Ridge seriously.” Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.) complained, "I would be asked by the FBI to believe (Ruby Ridge) was almost a model of (good) conduct. The conclusion, is drawn, from ... all the people we've heard, that no one did anything wrong of significance or consequence."

The FBI suppressed mounds of evidence regarding its final assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. The FBI had always vehemently denied that it had any blame for a fire that killed nearly 80 people; six years after the attack, investigators found pyrotechnic rounds the FBI fired into the building before the conflagration erupted. Attorney General Janet Reno lashed out at the FBI for destroying her credibility.

Newsweek reported that, according to a senior FBI official, “as many as 100 FBI agents and officials may have known about” the military-style explosive devices used by the FBI at Waco, despite Reno’s and the FBI’s repeated denials that such devices were used. The FBI deceived Congress and a federal judge by withholding information that it had six closed-circuit television cameras monitoring the Davidians’ home throughout the siege. The resulting films could have the key information that could resolve the major issues of Waco but the FBI withheld the tapes for years, until they were impounded by U.S. marshals.

@Jacanuk: @Damedius: Thank you, I will read them shortly.

@Jacanuk: @Damedius: Removing exposition from The Hill's piece, those both say the same thing - that there's no evidence for ZeroHedge's claims.

By all means, investigate - I want to see record keeping and transparency procedures followed as well. But what ZeroHedge has been doing for years is disgusting, and this piece appears to follow in that tradition.

TL;DR: Don't use ZeroHedge as a source, investigate what led to the gap.

lol. Zerohedge. Come on, dude. Please.

Innocent, as the IG determined already.

Peter Strzok is a major enemy or Russia

Thread should be locked.