Republican lawmakers are demanding that the FBI appoint a second independent special counsel to look into the agency’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) are calling for the FBI to appoint the second special counsel to investigate how the agency handled the Clinton probe and whether the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia was “politically motivated.”
“Unreal. We’ve been asking for the remaining text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents (and former Mueller team members), Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The FBI now says the texts are ‘missing,'” Meadows tweeted on Monday. “If it wasn’t already clear we need a second special counsel, it’s abundantly clear now”:
The calls for another special prosecutor come after revelations surfaced that the FBI failed to archive five months of text messages between two FBI agents accused of having a pro-Clinton and anti-Donald Trump bias while working on the Trump Russia probe.
“First the IRS destroyed emails pivotal to our investigation of their political targeting,” Jordan tweeted on Sunday. “Now the FBI ‘failed to preserve’ texts between Peter Strzok & Lisa Page following the ’16 election. The time for a second special counsel is now”:
Republican criticism of the FBI for its potential bias against Trump at the agency intensified after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for an explanation of what happened with the missing text messages.
In the letter, Johnson noted that the FBI told him it “failed to preserve” Strzok and Page’s text messages to each other between December 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017, and requested the agency provide all other records of communications between the two agents.