The inspector general report did not attribute the newly discovered texts to malicious intent, as President Donald Trump claimed, but rather a failure of the FBI’s automatic collection tool that is meant to sweep up electronic communications. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images white house Trump alleges misconduct after discovery of FBI texts, wishes Flynn 'good luck' at sentencing

President Donald Trump on Tuesday leveled fresh allegations of wrongdoing at the FBI after the discovery of thousands of missing text messages from the phones of former bureau officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, claiming without evidence that the newly uncovered texts had been “illegally deleted” and calling the development the “biggest outrage yet” in the probe into Russian election interference.

A report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog last week revealed that investigators had recovered about 19,000 text messages on the FBI-issued cellphones Strzok, a former counterintelligence agent, and Page, a former prosecutor, used while at the bureau and while working on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.


“Biggest outrage yet in the long, winding and highly conflicted Mueller Witch Hunt is the fact that 19,000 demanded Text messages between Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, were purposely & illegally deleted,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Would have explained whole Hoax, which is now under protest!”

The inspector general report did not attribute the newly discovered texts to malicious intent on the part of Strzok and Page, as Trump claimed, but rather a failure of the FBI’s automatic collection tool that is meant to sweep up electronic communications. The report didn’t include any information on what the texts contained, though investigators said the vast majority of the total messages recovered were exchanged between Strzok and Page, resulting in overlap in the count. The report also said that investigators recovered impartial texts and messages without date or time stamps that were not included in the total count.

As part of its investigation, the inspector general forensically examined six phones belonging to Strzok and Page spanning from their time on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s personal email server to their time on Mueller’s team. The two have come under fire for texts that expressed their clear preference for Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election.

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The watchdog found that all of the phones had been reset to their factory settings after the pair left the agency, not an atypical step, so that the devices could be reassigned to other agents. The watchdog also concluded that there was no policy at the FBI mandating the retention of texts sent on agency-issued devices, and called for such a policy to be put in place.

In a second Tuesday morning tweet, the president wished “good luck” to his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is set to be sentenced later in the day for lying to investigators about his contacts with the then-Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

“Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign,” Trump wrote.

Flynn, who was fired after less than a month on the job in the Trump administration, has been cooperating with Mueller’s team for roughly a year, and in a sentencing memo a few weeks ago prosecutors said he had provided “substantial assistance” to investigators and recommended the retired general serve little to no jail time.

Defenders of the president have recently taken a new line of attack on the Russia investigation relating to Flynn’s role, claiming that he was baited into perjuring himself by investigators, one of whom was Strzok.

The president’s well wishes for Flynn are a marked departure from his reaction to another one of his former associates who is cooperating with investigators. Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen last week was sentenced to three years in prison for a number of charges, including lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws by setting up hush money payments to women who have alleged affairs with Trump.

The president has railed against Cohen, calling him a “rat” and “weak,” and has accused him of lying to get a more lenient sentence.