PREDICTS “GARBAGE REPORT” FROM SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jan. 2, 2019) — On Wednesday evening’s “Hannity,” President Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told host Sean Hannity that 19,000 text messages generated by former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and exchanged between December 2016 and May 2017 were destroyed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “record officer.”
A report produced early last month by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, revealed that the missing texts have not been found despite Horowitz’s efforts, including enlisting a subject-matter expert in Android phones as well as the Department of Defense (DOD) to recover them.
The texts were exchanged at a point when Strzok and Page, who were each married but having an extramarital affair, were working on the “Hurricane Crossfire” investigation into the Trump campaign on the premise that one or more members of the presidential campaign were “colluding” with Russians to win the election.
Former FBI Director James Comey admitted in testimony to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last month that the FBI was surveilling four Americans associated with the Trump campaign for possible ties to Russia. Mueller and his hand-picked team assumed the FBI’s investigation after Comey was fired on May 9, 2017.
Thousands of text messages between Page and Strzok made public over the last year or more exhibited what Horowitz said in a separate report was a “troubling” political bias against Trump even as they served as investigators into the alleged Russia “collusion.”
Giuliani was brought on to Trump’s legal team last summer as other major players departed. The former New York City mayor has been highly critical of Mueller’s probe, stating that it is an effort aimed at finding a crime rather than prosecuting one based on probable-cause evidence.
Not for the first time, Giuliani stated that he and his team will produce a counter-report to any Mueller’s office might issue and that an investigation into the destruction of the texts is warranted. Giuliani told Hannity that he believes a crime has been committed and that if an average citizen had been involved, he or she would have become the subject of a criminal probe and probable “indictment.”
Mueller has provided no indication as to when his investigation, now into its 20th month, might be concluded. Giuliani added that he believes any work product from Mueller detailing his team’s conclusions as to Russian interference in the 2016 election and “collusion” between Trump aides and Russians will be a “garbage report.”