A partially redacted report by the Office of the Inspector General released on Thursday revealed the results of their investigation into the missing messages — namely, 20,071 new texts.
The investigation by the Justice Department’s watchdog into missing text messages from the issued cellphones by the FBI of former investigators Lisa Page and Peter Strzok recovered thousands of text messages on agency-issued phones belonging to the pair.
However, the report did not attribute the missing text messages to malicious intent on behalf of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, but rather a technology failure by the FBI’s tool meant to sweep up text messages, according to the new report.
The investigation into the pair stemmed from the inspector general’s review of actions taken by the FBI in the run-up to the 2016 presidential
“The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General initiated this investigation upon being notified of a gap in text message data collection during the period December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation mobile devices assigned to FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG’s Oversight and Review Division,” the report read.
“Specifically, the OIG’s Cyber Investigations Office was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text message for the referenced period from FBI issued mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page.”“In view of the content of many of the text messages between Strzok and Page, the OIG also asked the Special Counsel’s Office to provide the OIG the DOJ issues iPhones that had been assigned to Strzok and Page during their respective assignments to the SCO (Special Counsel’s Office).”
According to the report, the investigation involved tracking down the phones used by both Strzok and Page during the period.
“The OIG asked the FBI Inspection Division to locate the FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S5 devices formerly assigned to the subject employees and to obtain from the same individuals their assigned FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S7 devices,” the report read.
“The FBI provided these four devices to the OIG in late January 2018. CYBER utilized digital forensic tools to obtain data extractions from the four FBI issued mobile devices.“To ensure the thoroughness of text message recovery efforts, OIG also consulted with the Department of Defense, conducted additional quality assurance steps and hired a Subject Matter Expert.
“The result of these steps was the recovery of thousands of text messages within the period of the missing text messages, December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap time period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool.”
“The OIG forensically recovered thousands of text messages from FBI mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page through its multiple extraction efforts.”“Approximately 9,311 text messages were recovered from Strzok’s S5 (Samsung),” the report read. “Approximately 10,760 text messages were recovered from Page’s S5.”
That’s a total of 20,071.
At this stage we don’t know what all those messages contained, the report only says that what they found “included some political content, some work-related content, and some personal content.”
Nevertheless, the OIG said they couldn’t find any “discernable (sic) patterns regarding the content of text messages missed by the collection tool but captured by enterprise.db, or captured by the collection tool but not found in the enterprise.
Only 49 pages of texts, mostly redacted have been released so far:
Here they are:
PS LP Text Messages Dec 201… by on Scribd
Report by Rahid for MilneNews.com
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