FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his lover, bureau lawyer Lisa Page, sent each other an estimated 50,000 text messages during a five-month period in 2016 and 2017 that are now “lost.”

To put 50,000 texts in five months into perspective, consider this:

  • There are 12,960,000 seconds in five 30-day months.
  • The number 12,960,000 divided by 50,000 equals a new text message every 259.2 seconds.
  • This means Strzok and Page texted each other about every 4.32 minutes.
  • That’s every day of every week of every month for five months!

Investigators might wonder how Strzok and Page found time to do anything else — like participating in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of allegations President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russian interests to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The texts were sent during a crucial period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. The latter was the date Mueller was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The official explanation from the FBI to the Senate Homeland Security Committee for why the texts are missing is a technical glitch with Samsung 5 cellphones.

Related: Media Networks Ignore FBI’s Missing Texts from Anti-Trump Agents

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t buying that explanation, saying, “I have spoken to the inspector general, and a review is already underway to ascertain what occurred — and to determine if these records can be recovered in any other way. If any wrongdoing were to be found to have caused this gap, appropriate legal disciplinary action measures will be taken.”

Text messages between the two lovers that have been found show the two having deep-seated dislike for Trump and multiple indications that they and others at the Department of Justice and FBI were actively involved in actions intended initially to prevent Trump from being elected, and then, once he was elected, to frustrate his policy agenda and ultimately cause his removal from office, either by resignation or impeachment.

UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that there are multiple ways of calculating the potential interval between text messages exchanged by Strzok and Page. If eight hours of sleep are assumed each day, for example, the figure goes from a message every 4.32 minutes to one every 2.88 minutes.

It’s also unclear if the period covered by 50,000 messages is during the formerly missing five months or a longer period. A longer period with the same number of messages would result in more time elapsing between each one. Assuming a 10-month period, for example, would result in a new message every 8.64 minutes.

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Bottom line: As either Mark Twain or British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (or perhaps both) said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Senior editor Mark Tapscott can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.