FBI INVESTIGATORS REPORTEDLY SENT “CLASSIFIED INFORMATION” OVER UNSECURED DEVICES
by Sharon Rondeau
(Feb. 10, 2018) — On Saturday night’s “Watters’ World” on the Fox News Channel, investigative reporter Sara Carter and Fox News contributor told host Jesse Watters that her sources have told her that I-messages, or “instant messages,” exchanged between FBI staff attorney Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok are currently a focus of the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Strzok and Page both worked on the investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller until each was reassigned to a different area at different times. Their now-infamous text messages, which appear to indicate a distinct anti-Trump bias and possible intention to alter the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, have made headlines virtually every day for the last month on Fox and several other outlets.
The “mainstream” media, however, has been virtually silent on or defensive of the evidence that political corruption within the FBI and Justice Department may have not only brought the Clinton private email server probe to an abrupt close, but also spurred the opening of the Trump “Russia collusion” investigation.
Unexpectedly, Carter revealed early in the interview that her sources indicated that “classified information” was exchanged between Page and Strzok over unsecured devices.
During the segment Carter was joined by former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who said that his sources told him something very similar. “Now, from my source, if there was an audit request by the Senate or the House members in charge of oversight for those communications, they would have uncovered some very, very disturbing things…” Bongino said. “These were the people who were investigating the transfer of classified information over unclassified devices…”
Carter then characterized the “classified information” known to have been sent by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “small potatoes” compared to that which Page and Strzok exchanged, according to her sources.
Congressional committees are now investigating the State Department’s role in addition to that of the FBI and DOJ in procuring and disseminating two “dossiers” purported to have been compiled from reliable sources about Trump’s alleged encounters in Russia. The first “Trump dossier,” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele using unnamed Russian sources, has been said to have been the basis for at least four surveillance warrants applied for and received from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on Trump informal advisor Carter Page beginning in the fall of 2016.
On February 2, a four-page memo authored by the Republicans on the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was declassified and made public by the White House and contended that the high-ranking DOJ and FBI officials did not reveal to FISC judges that the Steele dossier had been obtained through purely political channels and funded by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
On Friday night, Carter told Sean Hannity that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report of his findings into alleged political influence on the part of the FBI in connection with the Clinton email server probe is expected to be made public next month.
Horowitz’s investigation began on January 12, 2017 and is believed to have unearthed the text messages exchanged between Page and Strzok which led to Strzok’s reassignment from the Trump/Russia investigation to the FBI’s Human Resources Department last summer.
Page’s involvement in the Russia probe reportedly ended earlier, although it is unclear if the texts played a role.
On Saturday, Carter predicted that Horwitz’s report will be “explosive.”
When the FBI told Congress in late January that it was unable to locate the duo’s texts exchanged between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017, Horowitz announced within a day that he was able to recover some by “using forensic tools” and that he would continue his efforts to recover all of the missing text messages.
Page and Strzok reportedly exchanged some 50,000+ text messages between July 2016 and June of last year, when what appears to have been a final text reading, “Please don’t ever text me again” was sent by Page to Strzok. “That number does not include the five months’ worth of texts that are missing,” Fox reported on January 22.