Three hundred and eighty-four pages of text messages between two “anti-Trump” FBI agents seem to suggest that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew in advance of former FBI Director James Comey’s July 2016 press conference that he would recommend no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton in her use of a private email server.
The information was turned over to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) on Friday. The texts also suggest that Comey and Lynch knew that Clinton would not face charges even before the FBI conducted its interview with Clinton. Documents also show that language in Comey’s statement was changed to make it less damaging to Clinton.
An original draft of Comey’s statement stated that Clinton had used personal email to contact President Barack Obama while traveling in a part of the world with sophisticated cybersecurity risks. According the documents, President Obama’s name was replaced with “another senior government official.” In Comey’s final statement, reference to incident was omitted entirely.
In the same disclosure, the FBI also informed HSGAC that it failed to preserve five months’ worth of text messages between the two agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The two had exchanged text messages expressing anti-Trump views during the 2016 presidential election. Both had been working on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling but were removed from Mueller’s team and reassigned.