Peter Strzok Has Lost His Security Clearance

Finally.

This probably had to do with the IG's inquiry. The IG can interview federal employees but not ex-federal employees (well, at least the IG has no authority to demand an interview).

People have said, erroneously I think, that Page and Strzok had "cooperated' with the IG. I think that is a misunderstanding. Their lawyered-up, "Gee I don't remember saying 'We'll stop it' and if I did say it I only meant we'll stop the exploitation of child labor" bullshit answers weren't "cooperation." They were just some lies they were telling because they had to offer some answers, so long as they were still sucking off the federal tit.

But now that the IG has probably gotten all of their bullshit answers, there's no reason to continue keeping these two as real employees.

This might be a move towards an eventual firing.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that former FBI official Peter Strzok has lost his security clearance amid an internal disciplinary review.

"Mr. Strzok, as I understand, has lost his security clearance," Sessions told radio host Howie Carr.

Strzok was escorted out of FBI headquarters on Friday, the day after the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its long-awaited report about the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

And we still don't know how it came to be that the most explosive of all of Peter Strzok's known texts came to be... unavailable, or at least not discoverable without some serious efforts by Horowitz to find it, which involved happening across the information that the FBI phones were capturing some old texts in their internal hard drive. Something that I guess most people didn't know.

Byron York reports that three attempts to capture missing texts did not find the "We'll stop it" text.

Finally, Horowitz's staff went back to the FBI and did a final search -- this was just a few weeks ago, in May -- and discovered that the phone itself "had a database on it that was actually also doing a collection of text messages."

Using that method, on their fourth run through the data, the IG staff discovered the "We'll stop it" text from Aug. 8, 2016. "It turned out that the FBI wasn't aware that that database on there, which was supposed to be an operating function, was actually collecting data," Horowitz said.

But there was something odd about it all. The Strzok "We'll stop it" text did not come from that period of time, December 2016 to May 2017, when the FBI system was not working. It came from August 2016, when the FBI system was supposedly collecting every message. That was the period of time from which the FBI originally turned over tens of thousands of Strzok-Page texts.

And yet, that one-line message -- "We'll stop it" -- was not turned over to the IG, and not turned over to Congress, either.

"It's now clear to us that the -- even when the software at the FBI was collecting text messages, because the August 8th period was within the collection period, we had the incoming Page to Strzok text, we didn't have the response," Horowitz told the Senate. "It's now clear to us that even outside this blackout period, we're not convinced that the FBI was collecting, for obvious reasons, 100 percent of the text messages."

On Tuesday, speaking to the House, Horowitz faced some skeptical questioning. There were reams of Strzok-Page texts turned over to Congress last fall, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said to Horowitz, "But there was one we didn't get to see -- one text message we didn't get to see that -- until last week, when your report came out, and it just happened to be the most explosive one, the one that says, 'We'll stop Trump.' How come we didn't see that beforehand?"

"There was, in that fourth recovery that we made in May, there was 100,000-plus lines of text to go through," Horowitz said. "Most -- all of them we'd found before. This one was one we hadn't. We didn't see it, or pick it up, until June."

"Did you not see it, or was it hidden from you?" Jordan asked. "Because we have the text message right before it, and the one that happened right after it, but somehow that one — the most explosive one — was missing from the pages that we got months ago."

Horowitz said he did not believe the Justice Department knew about the text before the IG's office discovered it. "I don't think the department had it," Horowitz said. But any chance for Horowitz to elaborate on that, or to satisfy Republican suspicions about the Justice Department's role, was lost when Jordan's time ran out, and no one picked up his line of questions.

As far as I can tell, no one directly asked Strzok if he deleted the text. And Strzok's official story is that he doesn't remember the text at all.

posted by Ace of Spades at 07:22 PM

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