New text messages released Thursday between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page indicate that the two were concerned about how the FBI email investigation would be viewed by the person they viewed as the likely next president of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Page and Strzok were having an extramarital affair and exchanged more than 50,000 texts with each other during the election.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley released new messages exchanged by the couple between February and September of 2016.
“One more thing: she might be our next president,” Page texted Strzok on Feb. 25, 2016, referring to Clinton.
“The last thing you need [is] going in there loaded for bear,” she continued. “You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more [DOJ] than [FBI]?”
Strzok texted back that he “agreed” and had relayed their discussion with someone named “Bill.”
The texts strongly suggest that the two were consciously soft-peddling the investigation.
“If you read all the texts, it’s clear that… they wanted her to be the president of the United States. They really, really didn’t want Donald Trump to be president of the United States,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said on the Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight. “And they concede throughout these texts that they did things differently in this investigation from any other investigation that they were part of.”
“What does it tell you about what they thought of Hillary Clinton?” Carlson asked. He added that it looked like “they believed if she became president, she would punish our chief law enforcement agency for investigating her.”
“It’s either that — or I think another reasonable construction could be that she would reward the DOJ thinking it was more DOJ lawyers that concluded she should not be charged as opposed to the FBI,” Gowdy replied. “And that’s actually how I read it — that she would give more credit to the Department of Justice …”
Gowdy said that from what he has been able to gather from the texts, it seemed like they had no intention of charging her even though they didn’t know what she was going to say in her interview with the FBI months later. “I read that to be they were concerned the DOJ would get the credit for taking care of her more than the bureau would,” Gowdy argued.
Strzok worked on both the Clinton email investigation as well as the special counsel’s Russia probe until he was removed in July of 2017 when anti-Trump texts were discovered on his phone. FBI lawyer Page also briefly worked on the special counsel investigation.
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