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“Department of Justice investigators were unable to recover text messages Peter Strzok and Lisa Page sent during their short tenure on the special counsel’s investigation, according to a report released Thursday by the DOJ’s office of the inspector general (OIG).
(…) The new OIG report focuses mostly on a five-month gap in messages between Strzok and Page. When investigators began looking at Strzok and Page’s FBI-issued phones, they found no messages from Dec. 13, 2016, to May 17, 2017, the same day Mueller was appointed special counsel.
The FBI chalked the missing text messages up to a glitch that affected the message retention system on many FBI-issued phones. Government forensic analysts were able to recover many texts from the missing period. The OIG did not dispute the FBI’s claims about why the messages were missing from the phones.
The phone Strzok used while he was on the Mueller team was inspected by a records officer with the special counsel, who found no “substantive” messages on the device. Page’s device was only recovered by the inspector general in September. It had been reset to factory settings July 31, 2017.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/13/2018) (OIG Report, December 2018)