The Justice Department Inspector General this week addressed why the most incriminating text sent by FBI official Peter Strzok, in which he said "we'll stop" President Donald Trump's election, wasn't made public earlier, the Washington Examiner reports.
FBI official Lisa Page, with whom Strzok was having an extramarital affair, sent him a text on Aug. 8, 2016 asking, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!"
Strzok replied: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."
Although thousands of texts between Page and Strzok were given to congressional investigators month ago, this particular message only became known to lawmakers and the general public after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI's conduct last week.
According to testimony given by Horowitz before the House and Senate this week, the FBI gave tens of thousands of texts to the IG's office, but with a months-long gap between mid-December 2016 to mid-May 2017 in which no texts were given.
Horowitz concluded that text messages were missing, took Strzok's and Page's phones, and "undertook a series of steps to seek to exploit, to extract the missing text messages from the phones."
After multiple extraction attempts and help from an outside contractor and the Department of Defense, the IG's staff went back to the FBI and found that the phone "had a database on it that was actually also doing a collection of text messages," which led to the discovery of the text from August 8, 2016.
"It turned out that the FBI wasn't aware that that database on there, which was supposed to be an operating function, was actually collecting data," Horowitz said.
"It's now clear to us that the — even when the software at the FBI was collecting text messages, because the August 8th period was within the collection period, we had the incoming Page to Strzok text, we didn't have the response," he told the Senate. "It's now clear to us that even outside this blackout period, we're not convinced that the FBI was collecting, for obvious reasons, 100 percent of the text messages."
Horowitz said that he doesn't think the Justice Department knew of the message or intentionally withheld the text from his office, telling the House that he didn't "think the department had it."