Congressional
investigators were rocked this weekend when the FBI notified them that five
months of text messages from a top FBI investigator into the Trump campaign’s
Russian connections had mysteriously vanished.
The
FBI-issued cell phone of Peter Strzok, whose previous texts to his mistress
(also an FBI employee) showed fierce hostility to Trump, suddenly had problems
due to “software upgrades” and other issues — and voila — all the messages between the two
from Dec. 14, 2016, to May 17, 2017 vanished. Strzok, who oversaw
the Trump investigation from its start in July 2016, was removed from Mueller’s
Special Counsel investigation last summer after the Justice Department
Inspector General discovered his anti-Trump texts.
Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general
for legislative affairs, notified a Senate committee that “data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval
was not collected.” The missing texts could have obliterated the remnants of credibility
of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
Conservatives
are caterwauling about the vanished evidence but this type of tactic has long
been standard procedure for the FBI. Acting FBI chief Patrick Gray was forced
to resign in 1973 after it was revealed that he had burned incriminating evidence from
the White House in his fireplace shortly after the Watergate
break-in by Nixon White House “plumbers.” Gray claimed he was resigning to
preserve the “reputation and integrity” of the FBI — but that hasn’t worked out
so well.
The
FBI has a long history of “losing” evidence that would tarnish its halo. And
for most of the agency’s history, judges and Congress have let the FBI sweep
its dirt under the rug.
In
the Ruby Ridge case, when an FBI sniper gunned down an Idaho mother holding her
baby in 1992, the chief of the FBI’s Violence Crimes division was sent to
prison for destroying evidence. When a Senate committee held hearings three
years later, four FBI agents took the Fifth
Amendmentrather than tell the incriminating truth about their
activities on the Ruby Ridge case. A subsequent Senate report concluded that
the five successive FBI reports of internal investigations of the episode
"are variously contradictory,
inaccurate, and biased. They demonstrate a reluctance on the part of
the FBI initially to take the incidents at Ruby Ridge seriously.” Sen. Herbert
Kohl (D-Wis.) complained, "I
would be asked by the FBI to believe (Ruby Ridge) was almost a model of (good)
conduct. The conclusion, is drawn, from ... all the people we've heard,
that no one did anything wrong of
significance or consequence."
The
FBI suppressed mounds of evidence regarding its final assault on the Branch
Davidians in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. The FBI had always vehemently
denied that it had any blame for a fire that killed nearly 80 people; six years
after the attack, investigators found pyrotechnic
rounds the FBI fired into the building before the conflagration erupted.
Attorney General Janet Reno lashed out at the FBI for destroying her
credibility.
Newsweek reported that, according to
a senior FBI official, “as many as 100 FBI agents and officials may have known
about” the military-style explosive devices used by the FBI at Waco, despite
Reno’s and the FBI’s repeated denials that such devices were used. The FBI deceived
Congress and a federal judge by withholding information that it had six closed-circuit
television cameras monitoring the Davidians’ home throughout the siege.
The resulting films could have the key information that could resolve the major
issues of Waco but the FBI withheld the tapes for years, until they were impounded by U.S.
marshals.
FBI
evidence shenanigans destroyed the prosecution of Cliven Bundy, the Nevadan
rancher who was involved in a high-profile standoff with federal agents in
2014. The feds charged the Bundy family with conspiracy in large part because
the ranchers summoned militia to defend them after they claimed that FBI
snipers had surrounded their ranch. Justice Department lawyers scoffed at this
claim in prior trials involving the standoff but newly-released documents
confirm that snipers were in place prior to the Bundy’s call for help. Federal
judge Gloria Navarro slammed the
FBI last month for withholding key evidence in the case.
Evidence
disposal is no problem for politically-favored targets of FBI investigation. A
month before the 2016 election, Americans learned that the FBI agreed to destroy the
laptops of top Hillary
Clinton aides after a limited examination of their
contents (including a promise not to examine any emails or content after
January 31, 2015) in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email
server. Four Republican congressional committee chairmen complained to Attorney
General Lynch that the FBI agreement was " simply astonishing given the
likelihood that evidence on the laptops would be of interest to congressional
investigators.” The FBI shrugged off the Clinton team’s subsequent use of bleachbit software to erase thousands
of her emails. Jeff Sessions, who was then a U.S. senator and
is now Attorney General, condemned the FBI’s behavior as “breathtaking:”
“I really don’t see how Congress can
issue a subpoena for records and they then destroy those records. I
am telling you that every business knows that if they get a subpoena for
business records, and they destroy those records, they are subject to criminal
prosecution and will be prosecuted.”
Will
the FBI face any consequences for its latest lost evidence debacle? In our
high-tech era, it is no longer necessary to toss damning evidence into a
fireplace. “Software upgrades” sounds so innocuous that only conspiracy
theorists could wonder about missing smoking guns. But the FBI is no closer to
being compelled to operate openly than when Patrick Gray ignited those White
House files.
James
Bovard is a USA Today columnist and the
author of 10 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of
American Liberty” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
