El Presidente Trumpo is hopping angry this morning, and his tirade actually began last night.
With this tweet:
He’s jumping on a report that is being passed around on right-wing media accusing Mueller’s team of improperly deleting texts, and saying that he destroyed evidence.
That would be definitely a damning accusation, if true:
An investigation by the Justice Department’s watchdog into missing text messages from the FBI-issued cellphones of former investigators Lisa Page and Peter Strzok recovered thousands of text messages on agency-issued phones belonging to the pair.
But it did not attribute the missing texts to malicious intent on behalf of the two but rather a technology failure by the FBI’s tool meant to sweep up text messages, according to a new report.
The department discovered a five-month gap in which the FBI’s automated collection tool did not sweep up any texts from the phones both of Page and Strzok, coinciding with their time on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The inspector general’s investigation recovered around 9,311 complete text messages sent or received on Strzok’s phone that it was able to date to the period of the collection-tool failure, and around 10,760 from the same period from Page’s phone, the vast majority of which were exchanged between the two, which the inspector general said resulted in overlap for many of the texts it recovered.
An expert on Android phones obtained by the inspector general’s office was able to recover an additional 62 text messages during the period of the collection-tool failure and additional messages that fell outside of that window.
So we’ll see how that develops.
Trump went on this morning about the accusations:
“Want them!”
He also threatened litigation against the media again:
Given his vast experience with the media from before being elected president he knows it’s legal, because he’s already said in the past that he wants to change the libel laws in order to sue the media. So far, he has not done anything on that threat. And most pro-First Amendment defenders don’t want him to. Even if you want the government to have more regulation on speech just because Trump is in power, there’s no guarantee that it’ll never fall into Democrat hands – do we really want the government to regulate speech under President Kamala Harris or President Big Chief Liz Warren? I think not.
UPDATE:
Trump continued tweeting about this.
Some are questioning his claim – even Cohen admitted that the FBI agents were very nice to him when they raided his office and residence.
BUT notice – he’s even offering some sympathy for Cohen, when he’s got Giuliani out there just berating him. Very odd.
And…
Also back to immigration:
He also tweeted that he would look into the murder charges against former Green Beret Mathew Golsteyn – you can read about that here in this post.