Another day, another scandal compliments of the FBI.

A former bureau informant revealed to Fox News contributor Sara Carter that forensic experts can easily retrieve deleted text messages from Samsung 5 phones. How does the ex-informant know? Forensic experts located lost texts from his own phone. Another source, expressing bewilderment at the FBI’s explanation as to why they could not hand over the texts, questioned the bureau’s wisdom to mislead Congressional investigators.

Sara Carter reports:

A former FBI special agent, who worked extensively on counterterrorism related cases, stated they were “dumbfounded” by the FBI’s original excuse that the text messages were irretrievable. TRENDING: Black Lives Matter Activist Wearing 'Justice for Breonna Taylor' Shirt Walked into a Louisville Bar and Murdered Three People “Even though the servers ‘lost’ the text messages of Strzok they would still be on his actual device, even if he deleted them,” stated the former FBI special agent, who asked to speak on background due to the sensitivity of the case. “That’s how we catch bad guys, we forensically search their phones. Nothing disappears off the device, nothing… unless they take a hammer to it or microwave it. The question is, the FBI knows this, so why did the bureau say they couldn’t retrieve them – why did they mislead Congress.” […] A former informant for the FBI, who spoke to this reporter, said the FBI was able to do the same with his Samsung 5 telephone registered to Verizon and he questioned why the FBI told the committees the information was not retrievable. “Their forensic experts who worked on my Samsung 5, which was wiped clean, to retrieve the information they needed,” said the former FBI informant, who asked not to be named. This reporter viewed the documents for the informant’s phone and the permission they gave to the FBI to retrieve the text messages from the phone. “The FBI forensics team said it would be no problem at all pulling up the missing texts from the phone,” the FBI informant said. “It makes me wonder why they didn’t do that with the two agents phones to begin with and why did they tell the committees they couldn’t retrieve the texts.’

According to Republican Senator Ron Johnson’s letter, the bureau told Stephen Boyd, the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs, that due to FBI-provided Samsung 5 mobile phones with software upgrades that “conflicted,” with “collection capabilities,” the text messages were not recorded.

However, according to the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross, the FBI claimed it the reportedly missing text messages to Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz on August 10th, 2017.

Strzok, who then served as the FBI’s No. 2 counterintelligence official, conducted many of the biggest interviews in the investigation, including with Clinton and her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. “After finding a number of politically-oriented text messages between Page and Strzok, the OIG sought from the FBI all text messages between Strzok and Page from their FBI-issued phones through November 30, 2016, which covered the entire period of the Clinton e-mail server investigation,” Horowitz wrote to Grassley and Johnson on Wednesday. The FBI handed over those messages on July 20, 2017. After reviewing those exchanges, Horowitz expanded the investigation to include all of the text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page from Nov. 30, 2016 to July 28, 2017. Horowitz’s office received those messages on Aug. 10.

Here is a screenshot from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitiz’s letter to Grassley and Johnson confirming the FBI successfully sent over Page and Strzok’s text messages.

Credit: Strzok Text Messages Deleted – Letter From Ron Johnson to Christopher Wray Letter

On December 13th, Horowitz confirmed to Johnson and Grassley that the text messages were received. However, just over a year later, Johnson, citing Boyd, said the FBI never handed over the text messages.

Credit: ZeroPointNow

From what we know now, the probability that thousands of FBI agents lost their texts is not very high.

Why did the FBI tell the DOJ, who then told Congressional investigators, that the texts could not be located, if foreign experts have retrieved messages in the past?

On Sunday, we learned additional text messages sent and received by disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok had been handed over to Congress. In yet another twist to the Strzok saga, the FBI failed to hand over a block of the agent’s text messages between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017 because they went “missing.”