President Trump is stirring up a new conspiracy theory on Twitter in his desperate attempt to deflect the heat from Special Counsel Mueller’s escalating criminal probe.
Last month, in a highly irregular, partisan maneuver, the Department of Justice very deliberately leaked text messages from a top FBI agent. Counterintelligence Section Chief Peter Strzok had a low opinion of both presidential candidates in 2016, but Republicans seized on the disparaging remarks he wrote about Trump to pitch a bogus narrative of partisan bias.
This week, the FBI admitted that some of Strzok’s text messages from late last year, through the spring, have been lost due to a technical glitch in rolling out secure Samsung Galaxy 5 smartphones. That prompted the President to send out this late night tweet:
Where are the 50,000 important text messages between FBI lovers Lisa Page and Peter Strzok? Blaming Samsung!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2018
As usual, the facts just don’t matter to Trump, but he’s happy to push a false narrative out to his consistently diminishing online audience.
Trump’s claim that 50,000 messages are missing is unsupported by facts and the Department of Justice hasn’t pinned down exactly what happened yet either or if the messages can be retrieved elsewhere yet, as the Attorney General explained publicly. Vox reports:
The official explanation from the Justice Department is that there was a problem with Strzok and Page’s bureau-issued Samsung Galaxies — that “firmware upgrades” and other technical issues deleted records of texts sent from many phones across the bureau. But Trump and his allies didn’t buy it and have waged a furious campaign in the media to declare the missing texts as proof of an FBI conspiracy.
There is no evidence to support such a wild claim. Whether there actually was a software glitch is easily verifiable; according to a Monday statement from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Inspector General’s office is already investigating the issue.
Some of Trump’s best people did get the memo that a completely unprovable conspiracy theory is needed and leaped to the President’s defense.
A top Republican Senator began openly promoting Alex Jones-style wacko-bird conspiracies against the FBI.
Then, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange weighed in responding to Trump’s late night tweet with a 4am local time tweet from London supporting Trump and attacking America’s law enforcement agencies.
Be prepared for an onslaught of #ObamaDeepState cover from @CNN and the like when the highly redacted @FBI memo is released. The #FakeNews will claim it’s merely an effort between @realDonaldTrump and Russia to undermine & distract from the terminally ill #Mueller investigation.
— Julian Assange (@TheRealJuIian) January 24, 2018
President Trump is reeling after today’s revelations that Mueller is zeroing in on his firing of Flynn and Comey as central questions in his criminal obstruction of justice probe and that both ex-FBI Director James Comey and recused Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III testified to the Special Counsel’s office.
Now that the noose is tightening around the illegitimate neck of the Republican presidential administration, expect to see ever more frequent conspiracy theories arise in their efforts to use propaganda and false reports to discredit the FBI.
So much for the Republican party of “law and order.”
