Coming up

Lisa Page speaks

Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text-message exchanges with agent Peter Strzok that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news. They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his “deep state” conspiracy.

[...]

I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11.

[...]

“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” she says. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”

She is also about to be back in the news cycle in a big way. On Dec. 9, the Justice Department inspector general report into Trump’s charges that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign will come out. Leaked press accounts indicate the report will exonerate Page of the allegation that she acted unprofessionally or showed bias against Trump.

[...]

She said she wouldn’t discuss the findings until they were officially public, but she did note: “While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people. The president has a very loud megaphone.”

  Daily Beast

Yeah, that will get her some new nasty tweets from Trump.

“It’s like being punched in the gut. My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”

“But it’s also very intimidating because he’s still the president of the United States. And when the president accuses you of treason by name, despite the fact that I know there’s no fathomable way that I have committed any crime at all, let alone treason, he’s still somebody in a position to actually do something about that. To try to further destroy my life. It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me.”

[...]

“There are two things that happen in the late summer of 2016,” Page says. “The first, of course, is that the FBI gets the predication [courtesy of loose-lipped George Papadopoulos], which starts the Russian investigation. We learn about the possibility that there’s someone on the Trump campaign coordinating with the Russian government in the release of emails, which will damage the Clinton campaign.”

“Predication” sounds mild for what it really means; in the summer of 2016, the FBI and the intelligence community were seeing increasing signs from a variety of intelligence sources and programs (that Page cannot and will not discuss due to classification reasons) that members of the Trump campaign were tied to a variety of Russian intelligence services, and that the Russian Federation was in the midst of trying to manipulate the 2016 United States election with a sweeping information-warfare and propaganda effort.

[...]

At the end of July 2016, Page finds herself transitioning from one investigation, the Hillary Clinton email inquiry, to another, the Russian government disinformation probe. Trump is not under investigation, but the FBI is trying to determine if someone associated with his campaign is working with Russia.

“We were very deliberate and conservative about who we first opened on because we recognized how sensitive a situation it was,” Page says. “So the prospect that we were spying on the campaign or even investigating candidate Trump himself is just false. That’s not what we were doing.”

[...]

Page would have probably just been another FBI lawyer if it wasn’t for the extraordinarily politicized environment and a president who had a habit of attacking career government employees. Page, like many other targets of Trump’s wrath, felt the pressure both from the external force of his massive social media presence, but also from within the government.

“At the end of July in 2017, I am informed by the DOJ Inspector General's Office that I’m under investigation for political text messages and honestly, I have no idea what they’re talking about,” she told me. “I have no recollection. And initially they’re very coy about it. They don’t tell me much about it. I don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about. What I do know is that my text messages will reveal that I had previously had an affair. I’m overwhelmed by dread and embarrassment."

[...]

The few texts that so convulsed the Republicans involved Page asking for reassurance that Trump wouldn’t become president, and Strzok replying with “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

[...]

She is convinced that she’s followed the rules. She is, after all, a lawyer and knows that she is a restricted employee under the Hatch Act and can’t engage in partisan political activity. “And I know I’m nowhere close to that,” she says. “I don’t engage in any sort of partisan politicking at all. But having an opinion and sharing that opinion publicly or privately with another person is squarely within the permissible bounds of the Hatch Act. It’s in the regs. Yeah, it says it plainly. I’m thinking, I know I’m a federal employee, but I retain my First Amendment rights. So I’m really not all that worried about it.”

[...]

Then in early December 2017, the day after [Gen. Mike] Flynn’s plea, a report comes out about Page being under investigation for political bias—and it includes the affair. The affair was not part of IG’s investigation and not part of their review.

[...]

The Inspector General’s Office had guaranteed Page and Strzok that the affair would not be made public. But then, The Washington Post included the affair in its story. And in a slip of a second, Page goes from being an anonymous government lawyer to playing an unwilling and recurring role in Trump’s twisted tweetstorms.

“So now I have to deal with the aftermath of having the most wrong thing I’ve ever done in my life become public,” she says. “And that’s when I become the source of the president’s personal mockery and insults. Because before this moment in time, there’s not a person outside of my small legal community who knows who I am or what I do.

[...]

“A week or two later, Rod Rosenstein [then the deputy attorney general] was scheduled to testify on the Hill. And the night before his testimony, the Justice Department spokesperson, Sarah Flores, calls the beat reporters into the Justice Department. This is late at night on a weekday. Calls them in to provide a cherry-picked selection of my text messages to review and report on in advance of Rod Rosenstein going to the Hill the next morning.”

Why does she think the administration released her text messages?

“You’d have to ask Sarah Flores,” she says. “I can tell you that the reporters there that night were told that they weren’t allowed to source them to the Justice Department, and that they weren’t allowed to copy or remove them, just take notes."

[...]

Sarah Isgur Flores has left the administration and referred questions to the Justice Department. The department declined to comment.

[...]

Ben Wittes wrote on the Lawfare blog, “Rosenstein here has, at a minimum, contributed to that circus—at the expense of his own employees. In throwing a career FBI agent and career FBI lawyer to the wolves by authorizing the release to the public of their private text messages—without any finding that they had done anything wrong—he once again sent a message to his workforce that he is not the sort of man with whom you want to share your foxhole.”

Page felt abandoned by the FBI and Justice because of the release of the messages and because the bureau issued no statement defending her and Strzok. “So things get worse,” she continues. “And of course, you know, those texts were selected for their political impact. They lack a lot of context. Many of them aren’t even about him or me. We’re not given an opportunity to provide any context. In a lot of those texts we were talking about other people like our family members or articles we had sent each other.”

[...]

[Page] left the FBI in May 2018 (which is why she says she is now free to talk to the press—she hasn’t worked for the government for 18 months).

Could she have stayed if she had wanted to? “No, not for much longer. It was very inhospitable.

[...]

"[I]t’s not over. It’s ongoing. It’s not a historical event that is being relived. It just keeps happening.

[...]

“I mean, he tweeted about me four days ago,” she told me on Nov. 18. “When Roger Stone got convicted, he asked, why isn’t Page in jail too? Not to mention, you know, his truly reprehensible, degrading stunt at his rally, in which he used my name to simulate an orgasm. And I don’t ever know when the president’s going to attack next. And when it happens, it can still sort of upend my day. You don’t really get used to it.”

[...]

One thing becomes quickly apparent talking to Page: What really upset her, what still devastates her, was not the end of her extremely promising career at the FBI, but instead what Trump has done to the FBI itself.

[...]

“The thing about the FBI that is so extraordinary is that it is made up of a group of men and women whose every instinct is to run toward the fight. It’s in the fiber of everybody there. It’s the lifeblood. So it’s particularly devastating to be betrayed by an organization I still care about so deeply. And it’s crushing to see the noble Justice Department, my Justice Department, the place I grew up in, feel like it’s abandoned its principles of truth and independence.”

[...]

[Page is] still married to her husband and they have two small children. Ultimately, she was just another public servant like Fiona Hill or Marie Yovanovitch. She was dragged into the spotlight, her text messages weaponized, and her life destroyed so that the Trump administration could have a brief distraction.

The era of Trump populism always had an ugly edge, particularly toward women. Trump revels in bringing misery to his opponents and will always seek out and exploit any weakness. Page “wasn’t nice to him,” and so in his eyes she can be endlessly targeted and assaulted.

It’s tempting to describe this as just part of Trump’s deep, baked-in misogyny and sociopathy, but in Page’s case it’s worse; it’s a sign of how deeply he’s corrupted the government to serve his will and his whims. His apologists have become part of Trump’s own squad of witch-hunters, hunting fantasies like “Ukrainian interference” while attacking the people who tried to protect us from Russian attacks.

UPDATE:

Never again

THIS PRESIDENT SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A COUNTRY AGAIN!

A special counsel is appointed when crimes are suspected, not when they're proven, asshole.  And if there was nothing there but fakery and disgrace, why are so many of your campaign personnel getting prison sentences?

Dick.

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

UPDATE:

Or, as ex-federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti puts it:

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.

[...]

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."

[...]

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

[...]

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.

[...]

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."

[...]

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.

[...]

"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.

[...]

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.

[...]


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.

[...]

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

  Politifact

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

Rosenstein allegations

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page was present for Rosenstein's comments on secret recordings and did not believe he was joking or being sarcastic, according to two people familiar with the events in question. A spokesperson for Page declined to comment for this story.

[...]

Rosenstein attended meetings on May 16, 2017, where he reportedly discussed the 25th amendment and taping the president, the Times reported. Page attended one of the meetings and wrote a memo about it, multiple outlets have reported. Page, who left the FBI after being embroiled in a scandal involving sending text messages critical of Trump, did not think Rosenstein’s comments about covertly taping the president were in jest, the two sources told The Daily Beast.

  The Daily Beast

Maybe she got it right, maybe she got it wrong, but one thing's for certain: you can't put her on the pro-Trump FBI team.

But, once again, we've got second-hand reporting. That seems to be the standard for much of mainstream reporting these days.

The former official who was also in the room for the meeting Page attended told The Daily Beast he did not think Rosenstein was being serious when he made the comment.

“Never for one second did I think he was seriously suggesting that anybody do that,” that person said. He added that, to his knowledge, there was no further discussion or action on recording the president—reinforcing his assessment that Rosenstein wasn’t being serious.

The only one who knows whether Rosenstein was being serious is Rosenstein, and he says he was being sarcastic. Of course, if he WERE being serious, he wouldn't be admitting it now.

More on Trump's rage against DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr

Why go after Ohr, when many close observers assess that he was doing his duty by reporting Steele’s information to the FBI in late November 2017? Sitting on that information from the former British intelligence officer, who had his own track record helping the United States fight Russian organize crime, would have been a serious dereliction. And why does the president risk so much politically by even threatening to pull the security clearances of an active Justice Department official without any of the ordinary procedures for doing so?

[...]

Ohr has never criticized Trump as far as anyone is aware, and has worked at the Justice Department as an award-winning civil servant for nearly thirty years in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It has been noted that Ohr had ties to the notorious Christopher Steele dossier and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, a former British agent, to investigate Trump. But there is quite likely another reason which could trouble Trump even more: Ohr’s job in the Justice Department involved facing off against Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich whose operatives have been using Trump branded properties to launder millions of dollars for more than three decades. [...] What the public should also understand is how Mogilevich has served as an agent for Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the United States and abroad.

[...]

Over the years, no fewer than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold in all cash purchases to anonymous shell companies—the two criteria that set off alarm bells among anti-money laundering authorities. In 2002, after Trump had gone belly up in Atlantic City, Bayrock, a real estate development company that allegedly had ties to Mogilevich, moved into Trump Tower and partnered with Trump—in the process bailing out the bankrupt real estate mogul and putting him in a position to eventually run for the presidency.

[...]

And Ohr is not the only Mogilevich specialist who has been the subject of Trump’s ire. Last September, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page was fired from her position on Mueller’s probe into the Trump-Russia scandal after anti-Trump text messages exchanged between her and Peter Strzok came to light. [...] However, little attention was paid to what may well be the most interesting item on Page’s resume—her considerable experience prosecuting money laundering cases involving Russian organized crime, including working with the FBI’s task force in Budapest to prosecute a money-laundering case against Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch who partnered with both Paul Manafort and Semion Mogilevich.

[...]

In sum, a key to understanding Trump’s relationships with Russia goes through organized criminal syndicates. As I report on all this information and more in House of Trump, House of Putin, unlike the American Mafia, Russian mobsters operate as de facto state actors, with high-ranking crime bosses like Mogilevich working with and at the behest of Putin. All of which raises the question of whether Trump, by coming down on Ohr and perhaps also Page, is trying to keep the real story behind his many ties to Mogilevich operatives from unraveling.

  Just Security

I'd say that's a certainty.

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

Waiting for the correction

Layer?

Aha!  Lawyer.

This isn't exactly the whole picture, you'll be surprised to learn.

"All she is asking is to be treated as other witnesses have under the Committees' own rules," Page's attorney, Amy Jeffress said in a statement to CBS News' Paula Reid. Jeffress went on to say that Page simply wanted clarification about the scope of the interview and access to relevant documents. Late Wednesday night, the Justice Department granted that access.

"I received a message from the Department of Justice after 11 pm last night that they have finally granted her request to review the relevant documents," Jeffress said. "We are working to arrange that process quickly so that we can move forward with her appearance before the Committees." She reiterated that "There is no basis for claims that Lisa has anything to hide or is unwilling to testify," and pointed out that Page has cooperated with multiple investigations and has provided "more than 36 hours of testimony" to the Justice Department inspector general.

[...]

Jeffress told CBS News' Paula Reid that she and Page on Tuesday went to the FBI, her former employer, to review the materials that were sent to Congress, but they were not shown any documents after waiting more than three hours.

[...]

Jeffress said the committees issued the subpoena on Saturday, July 7, and would have been asking her about material Jeffress said she had not yet been shown.

[...]

Jeffress said in her statement Wednesday that the committees' "bullying tactics here are unnecessary. We expect them to agree to another date so that Lisa can appear before the Committees in the near future."

Her former FBI colleague Peter Strzok is scheduled to testify Thursday before Congress on the Russia investigation.

  CBS

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

DOJ report on FBI slightly less than Trump was looking for

But bad, nonetheless.

The Justice Department's internal watchdog has concluded that the FBI's most controversial decisions during the 2016 presidential election were not politically motivated, but the FBI's reputation has nonetheless been hurt by the actions of some of its agents – findings that come after a nearly two-year assault on the FBI by Donald Trump and other Republicans alleging FBI officials allowed political considerations to influence investigations.

[...]

Horowitz's report said [agent Page's anti-Trump messages back and forth with agent Strzok were] "not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice."

[...]

[I]n the nearly 500-page report released Thursday, Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he could not discount that political bias played a role in the FBI's delay in analyzing a laptop with potential evidence tied to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

  ABC

I have to admit that one would be hard to explain otherwise, but then Comey turned around and announced that the investigation was being reopened, which was harmful in the opposite direction. So, it looks like there was a large clusterfuck in the FBI. I'm not sure that's actionable.

I didn't know about this exchange between the two agents:

"[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Page wrote to Strzok in August 2016, as disclosed for the first time in Horowitz's report.

Strzok, at the time still leading the FBI probe into Clinton, responded: "No. No he's not. We'll stop it."

"We'll stop it"??? That does indeed look bad. On the other hand, Strzok was fired when Comey learned of these messages.  *Correction:  Mueller took Strzok off the case.  Comey was already gone.

Horowitz found anti-Trump messages from two other FBI agents and another FBI attorney that his report said "cast a cloud over the FBI's handling" of the Clinton case. In addition, "the damage caused by their actions extends far beyond the scope of the [Clinton] investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI's reputation for neutral factfinding and political independence," the report continued.

But, the report made clear, "our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed."

So, even finding that how Comey handled the Clinton investigation was "extraordinary and insubordinate", and "that Comey made a serious error of judgment," Horowitz found that "'judgment calls' made by those investigat[ing] Clinton 'were not unreasonable,' and the ultimate decision not to charge Clinton 'was consistent with the Department’s historical approach in prior cases under different leadership'." Yeah, because look at Alberto Gonzales, right?

So not quite the support Trump was looking for from the DOJ. He won't be happy.

But what does James Comey think?

We'll have to wait until His Lardship watches Fox News' report on the report before we get his tweet opinion.

The full report is here, where you can read it for yourself.

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

UPDATE 6/15:

His Lardship is unhappy with the conclusions.

The "Secret Society"

After seeing the full text of the email that sent Republicans into orgasms alleging there was a secret society in the FBI trying to undo Trump, I was left wondering what FBI agent Lisa Page was talking about when she mentioned calendars. Here's the explanation:

One text that Page sent Strzok early on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, has dominated the conservative media world this week, serving as a springboard for a Republican conspiracy theory suggesting that the nation’s premier law enforcement organization was plotting a coup against Trump within hours of his stunning victory.

“Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing,” Page, a FBI lawyer, wrote in the text to Strzok from her FBI-issued phone. “Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.”

Republican lawmakers seized upon the “secret society” reference this week, claiming to see sinister motives, and it started popping up all over cable news chyrons. But, in fact, it was almost certainly a joke, a bit of gallows humor after an election that featured Russian interference.

So what was that “calendars” reference all about? Out of context, it’s a bit confusing. But the backstory is actually kind of funny. The New York Times first reported that the “calendars,” which the Times said had a “Russia theme,” were a gag gift for those working on the early Russia probe.

[...]

It turns out that, as a joke, Strzok had purchased calendars featuring “beefcake” photos of Vladimir Putin doing manly, tough-guy things like riding a horse.

  HuffPo

And there you have it.

What’s remarkable about the “secret society” text message is that it has been available to reporters for more than a month, as it was included in a first set of texts that the Justice Department sent to Capitol Hill (and allowed reporters to view) in December. But it wasn’t picked up, even by Fox News (which had access to the texts), because it seemed like such an obvious joke.

[...]

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a prominent promoter of the “secret society” text, admitted Thursday there’s a “real possibility” that it was just a joke.

It's a testament to the GOP-Trump cabal desperation and fear that they are going back through everything they can to find something - anything - they can publicize to deflect attention and try to smear the Mueller investigation.

But, there actually was something of a secret FBI society. The only thing is, it was anti-Trump, it was pro-Trump, and aligned with Rudy Giuliani. Seth Abramson has a thread on that here, beginning with this post:

And here's a clip of Jim Comey's testimony before he was fired where Senator Leahy asks about those FBI agents, saying he'll be investigating that situation. No doubt another reason he got fired.

UPDATE:

Devin Nunes definitely knew better.  That was all for "the base."

UPDATE:

I'll be watching for the lawsuit

If you’re looking for a Justice Department scandal regarding Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's influence of the 2016 election, it's hiding in plain sight. Look no further than the government's release of the private texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Both Strzok, an FBI counter-intelligence agent, and Page, an FBI lawyer, were involved in the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, and were both briefly on Mueller's team investigating Russia's influence of the 2016 election.

  Bloomberg

She's a lawyer herself. Won't need to waste money on one.

The inspector general’s investigation is ongoing. Perhaps more evidence will emerge that the privately held opinions of two investigators contributed to then-FBI director James Comey's decision in July 2016 not to charge Clinton with a crime. [...] Until charges are pressed and evidence is considered, however, Page and Strzok are owed some due process.

[...]

This week, the Justice Department not only disclosed to Congress their private texts during an ongoing investigation, but then briefed their private texts to the media.

[...]

When I asked Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman, about the due process rights of Strzok and Page, he said: "The Department ensures that its release of information from the Department to members of Congress or to the media is consistent with law, including the Privacy Act."

[...]

If that is the case, then the Justice Department is in need of reform. Let's start with an obvious point. Publication of someone's private texts -- even if they are conducted on government phones -- is an astonishing breach of privacy.

[...]

FBI officers and lawyers are American citizens with the same free speech rights as the rest of us.

I think they're going to start arguing that no one in the country has the right to any expectation of privacy. What privacy?  This is AMERICA!  You've got nothing to hide unless you're a terrorist.

Former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy, a withering critic of the investigation into Trump, told me that he had problems with the way this case has been handled. "I think it's wrong that their texts have been massively released to the public,” he said. “I do think they should have been vetted so that only stuff that was relevant to whether there was bias in Mueller's investigation was sent to Congress. Congress is entitled to look at that, just as Mueller was entitled to look at that. But in an investigation, the public usually doesn't have a right to know about this until charges are brought."

Ah, but it's a brave new world.

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

It seems another mystery has been cleared up

The former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered he and another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging President Trump and supporting Hillary Clinton, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Peter Strzok, as deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, was a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server to do government work as secretary of state, as well as the probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

[...]

The Justice Department inspector general’s office said in a statement Saturday that its investigators are “reviewing allegations involving communications between certain individuals, and will report its findings regarding those allegations promptly upon completion of the review of them."

A spokesman for Mueller’s office said Strzok was removed “immediately upon learning of the allegations" and added that Page left the Mueller team two weeks before it became aware of the allegations.

  WaPo

Looks like Mueller has everything on everybody, including his own investigators.

The president’s most vociferous defenders in Congress have called for a special counsel to investigate how the FBI handled the Clinton probe and other Clinton-connected matters. Word of the texts could give new fuel to those demands.

Not "could". Will.