House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said Tuesday on Fox News that it is “stunning” to behold the “level of bias” FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exhibited against President Donald Trump in a series of text messages.
“We need to know how the world’s premier law enforcement agency managed to lose five months’ worth of texts,” Gowdy said on “America’s Newsroom.” “And what’s also troubling is in the texts we do have, they’re discussing how to avoid texts being captured and secured.”
“So what’s missing is important. But also what’s there is important,” Gowdy continued. “It is manifest bias — not just against Trump, but against his kids, against his business interests.”
Gowdy was referring to the thousands of emails and text messages Strzok and Page exchanged in 2016 and 2017. Many of the pair’s conversations have been recovered, but the FBI claims it lost five months’ worth of messages due to a technical problem.
Strzok and Page worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of allegations of collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and covert interests linked to the Russian government; they also worked on the FBI’s investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
The discovery of the pair’s blatantly anti-Trump and pro-Clinton text messages angered many Republicans who viewed the texts as evidence of crippling partisan bias at the highest levels of the FBI. News that the bureau claimed to have somehow lost five months’ worth of text messages between Strzok and Page further angered Republicans.
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Gowdy noted that one of the text messages showed Strzok and Page even hoped one of the Trump hotels would fail.
“That is a level of bias that you rarely see and you never see from law enforcement officers,” Gowdy said.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed last week that the committee obtained 384 new pages of Strzok-Page texts. Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) said Monday on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that Strzok implied in one of his messages that a “secret society” of anti-Trump federal agents attempted to prevent Trump from becoming president.
Related: FBI ‘Failed to Preserve’ Texts from Anti-Trump Mueller Staffers
“What’s also troubling to me is this text that Johnny Ratcliffe found last night, about this secret society,” Gowdy said. “Now, I have no clue what that means because that was not the phraseology I used. But it’s the day after the election and it’s the same two people who were discussing a little bit later in the text the damage they had done with the Clinton investigation and how they could, quote, ‘fix it’ and make it right.”
“That is a level of bias that is stunning among law enforcement officers,” Gowdy added.
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.
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