“It sure looks like a bureaucratic game of hide the ball, rather than a genuine concern about national security.”

Text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page came to light last month due to the anti-Trump rhetoric involved. Now the FBI claims that the department “failed to preserve” five months of text messages between them.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) have sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to demand answers over the missing text messages between Strzok and Page.

The letter includes nine questions, including seven parts to one question over the FBI’s explanation that a technical error “prevented the texts from being archived in the FBI’s records preservation system.” They asked:

Grassley reminded the DOJ that a letter from the department “suggested that DOJ OIG received all text messages between Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok from November 30, 2016 to July 28, 2017.”

During a speech on the Senate floor, Grassley lashed out at the FBI and DOJ. From Fox News:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley on Wednesday accused the FBI and the Justice Department of hiding information from the public about the Russia investigation and dossier author Christopher Steele, signaling a further deterioration of the relationship between the GOP and the DOJ. “It sure looks like a bureaucratic game of hide the ball, rather than a genuine concern about national security,” Grassley said in a speech on the Senate floor. The Iowa Republican said the department was using false classification labels to stop the release of information related to his criminal referral to the Justice Department of Steele, the former British spy who authored the infamous dossier of unverified claims about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “requested the criminal referral of [former British spy Christopher] Steele after discovering ‘discrepancies'” with different testimonies and the dossier against then-candidate Donald Trump. Steele authored the dossier.

Due to the latest revelation, Grassley “wants to release the ‘unclassified portions’ of his referral, but the DOJ and the FBI are preventing him from doing so, because the ‘FBI is falsely claiming that three of our unclassified paragraphs each contain the same, single classified fact.'” Fox News continued:

“If FBI really believed this fact was classified, then the FBI and the department should take better care to act consistent with that belief,” Grassley said. “Unfortunately, I suspect something else is really going on here.” Grassley said he doesn’t believe the fact at issue is classified for several reasons, including how Rosenstein discussed it “with me more than once in unsecure space and on an unsecure phone line.” He also said that the FBI is not acting as if this information would harm national security if released, and that other entities who received the memo were never contacted by the FBI to tell them it was classified. “Those particular paragraphs are based on nongovernment sources and do not claim to repeat or confirm any information from any government document. Even if those portions of our referral did reference the allegedly classified fact at issue, it is hard to understand why that fact should be classified.”



