Two FBI agents that have been under scrutiny over anti-Trump texts in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election spoke of a "secret society" meeting in a text exchange the day after the election. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill say they have seen many of the messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that are raising more questions.
Strzok was a top counter-intelligence officer with the FBI and was heavily involved with the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Mueller probe before being reassigned when his texts with Page came to light. Page is an FBI lawyer who was also involved in the Mueller probe but left before the messages with her boyfriend Strzok came to light.
The latest reveal from those messages has some politicians alarmed at what they have seen, reports Fox News:
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, said Monday that among the messages the pair exchanged are references to a “secret society” within the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of [Trump’s] election, that there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI -- to include Page and Strzok -- that would be working against him,” Ratcliffe said Monday on Fox News' “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
Ratcliffe says he hasn't seen evidence that such a "secret society" meeting took place but the simple fact that it is mentioned deserves to be questioned and explained by Strzok and Page:
Gowdy said the “secret society” reference occurred the day after Trump won the presidential election in November 2016.
“There’s a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these two supposed to be objective fact-centric FBI agents, saying that perhaps this is the first meeting of the ‘secret society,'” Gowdy said.
“So of course I’m going to want to know what secret society you’re talking about because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the Electoral College; so yeah I’m going to want to know," he said.
Previous comments found in the thousands of text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page showed an animosity to then-candidate Trump and talk of an "insurance policy" to stop him from winning the election.
While many of the text messages between the two have been turned over to Congress, it has been reported that months worth of messages between the two - from December 2016 until May 2017 - have gone missing, something the president was tweeting about Tuesday morning:
In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI now says it is missing five months worth of lovers Strzok-Page texts, perhaps 50,000, and all in prime time. Wow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2018