The Insp. Gen’l for the Dept of Justice discovered anti-Trump text messages of the FBI love-trio (Page/Strzok) on their FBI cell phones, and informed special counsel Mueller.
Mueller had hired them in May ’17 as part of his Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ investigative team, and they “were issued special counsel iPhones. They apparently used those phones in addition to the Samsung S7s, which they still had”.
As a result of the IG information, Mueller removed them from the team: Lisa Page left July 15, 2017, and Peter Strzok was gone in ‘late July 2017’…but the plot thickens.
As York notes…Mueller “thought the situation serious enough to remove Strzok and Page…Yet…the Mueller office stripped Page’s iPhone of all data without ever checking on its contents, and they stripped Strzok’s iPhone after a perfunctory check that may or may not have taken note of the content of its text messages. When Horowitz asked for and (belatedly) received the phones, he could recover nothing from them.”
Remember, Page/Strzok had been using those special counsel cell-phones for the two months prior to their final departure, in conjunction with their investigative efforts. And Mueller discharged them because of the virulent texting that had been going on prior, yet made no effort to protect the SC-issued iPhones, letting them get scrubbed.
Either Mueller’s not the sharpest pencil in the box, or he’s duplicitous in spoliation.
Either way, it disqualifies him as capable of a special counsel investigation. Hell, based on this information it disqualifies him from holding any kind of office…or a law degree.
(One can only hope somebody in the IG office remembers there’s an NSA.)