The watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department on Wednesday for text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
It was revealed this week that the two FBI officials, who were having an extramarital affair, exchanged tens of thousands of text messages while working on the Hillary Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations.
So far, the Justice Department has turned over nearly 400 pages worth of texts.
The messages revealed a strong anti-Trump bias, and also revealed the agents’ candid thoughts about the two investigations they worked on.
In one May 2016 exchanged, Strzok, a former deputy counterintelligence chief, said that there would be “pressure” to wrap up the Clinton investigation because of Trump’s Republican primary success.
Later that year, on Aug. 15, 2016, Strzok wrote a cryptic message about taking out an “insurance policy” of some sort in case of a Trump election win.
On Friday, the Justice Department informed six congressional committees that the FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of Strzok-Page texts. The agency said that “many” FBI-issued Samsung 5 phones failed to back up texts to bureau servers because of “misconfiguration issues.”
On Wednesday, Fox News reported that “thousands” of FBI phones were affected by the glitch.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, cast doubt on the claim that the Strzok-Page messages are lost.
“I don’t believe for one minute that the Strzok-Page texts are really missing,” he said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
Fitton compared the missing text messages to the Lois Lerner and Hillary Clinton email cases, which Judicial Watch filed several lawsuits over.
“We fully intend to get the ‘missing’ Strzok and Page documents,” said Fitton.
According to Fox, the Justice Department and FBI will attempt to recover Strzok and Page’s texts from their physical devices.
Judicial Watch is also suing for Strzok and Page’s travel records and other documents stretching back to Feb. 1, 2015. The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all of the documents last month.
