Several Republican lawmakers signed off on a letter sent Thursday to FBI Director Christopher Wray pushing for answers about five months worth of missing text messages between two FBI officials.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sent the letter seeking information about the FBI’s policies on maintaining communications and retrieving data and the technology that led to a failure to preserve the messages.
The FBI informed the Department of Justice this week that it failed to preserve text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Strzok was removed last year from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for sending anti-Trump messages.
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The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the missing messages, which the FBI said were not retained because of “misconfiguration issues” with the bureau’s mobile devices.
The missing text messages span from Dec. 14, 2016, to May 17, 2017, which is when Mueller was appointed as the special counsel to lead an investigation into Russian meddling.
Republican lawmakers, who have used Strzok’s messages to argue Mueller’s probe is biased against the president, have argued the missing messages are the latest indication of political bias within the FBI.
In an interview Wednesday night, Gaetz called the missing messages the “biggest coincidence since the Immaculate Conception.”
Pressed on what he meant by that, Gaetz inaccurately explained what the Immaculate Conception was, but said he was simply making a point about the absurdity of the coincidence of those texts from that timeframe missing.
The letter notes that during the time of the missing messages “President Trump formally took office, Michael Flynn was hired, fired, and interviewed (by Peter Strzok), Buzzfeed published the ‘salacious and unverified’ dossier, and Robert Mueller was appointed to serve as Special Counsel. The FBI’s message-retention capabilities were suddenly restored on May 17th, the same day Mueller was appointed.”
Eight other Republican lawmakers also signed off on the letter, including Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mark Sanford (S.C.), Mark DeSantis (Fla.), Blake Farenthold (Texas), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Raúl Labrador (Idaho), Mark Meadows (N.C.) and Glenn Thompson (Pa.).