Isolated and panicking

Where's his babysitter?



This might not be a good time for him to be bringing up obstruction of justice.  (Nor is it the first time he's made this claim.) Also, his claims are pure bullshit.

Trump’s reference to 19,000 texts appears to be the result of adding the total texts recovered from Strzok’s and Page’s S5 phones together.

But his suggestion that the messages are permanently lost is wrong. The OIG recovered a total of more than 126,000 lines of text from Strzok and Page.

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Trump also said the text messages, between former agent Peter Strzok and bureau lawyer Lisa Page, would have exposed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as a hoax, had they not been "purposely and illegally deleted."

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There are some major factual problems with Trump’s claim[s].

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First, a new report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog suggests the roughly 19,000 messages slipped through the cracks due to technical glitches with the FBI’s data-collection tool on Samsung devices, not because Strzok and Page went around the system.

Second, perhaps most importantly, while the messages were initially not captured, they have since been recovered. Trump’s claim gives the false impression the texts are still unaccounted.

[...]

The inspector general discovered a five-month gap in the Strzok-Page communications, from mid-December 2016 through mid-May 2017. This prompted the inspector general to conduct a follow-on report to supplement its June 2018 findings. The follow-on report, which further described the inspector general’s forensic efforts to recover the missing Strzok-Page texts, was released Dec. 13.

The inspector general found no evidence Strzok and Page tried to prevent the FBI from collecting their texts.

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It concluded: "The OIG investigation determined that the FBl's collection tool was not only failing to collect any data on certain phones during particular periods of time, it also does not appear that it was collecting all text messages even when it was generally functioning to collect text messages."

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An outside expert hired by the inspector general to assist with the Samsung portion of the investigation concluded "it was unlikely that Strzok and Page attempted to circumvent the FBI's text message collection capabilities," and the watchdog found no evidence they did.

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"OIG digital forensic examiners used forensic tools to recover thousands of text messages" from the Samsung S5 devices of Strzok and Page, the report notes.

Forensic experts recovered more than 9,300 texts sent or received from Strzok's S5 phone, about 8,300 of which were sent to or received from Page. They also collected 10,760 texts from Page’s S5 device, about 9,700 of which were communications with Strzok.

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Separately from their Samsung devices, the two officials were issued Apple iPhones when they began working as members of the special counsel investigation.

By the time the inspector general obtained their Apple phones, they had been reset to factory settings so they could be reassigned, and contained no data related to the previous owner’s use, the report states.

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And lastly, there is no evidence the texts show that the special counsel investigation is, as Trump called it, a "hoax."

We rate this claim Pants on Fire.

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We reached out to the White House for comment but did not hear back.

  Politifact

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.