Two days after Christmas, former New York City mayor and President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told The Hill’s TV program that Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government, should be investigated for destroying text messages related to the case.
Giuliani was being interviewed by Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton when he accused Mueller and his office of destruction of evidence because the special counsel erased text messages between fired FBI agent Peter Strozk and the FBI employee he was having an affair with, Lisa Page.
“Mueller should be investigated for destruction of evidence for allowing those text messages from Strzok to be erased, messages that would show the state of mind and tactics of his lead anti-Trump FBI agent at the start of his probe,” Giuliani told Sexton.
The Inspector General for the Department of Justice released a report earlier in the month that text messages between Strzok and Page were not fully preserved and had large gaps missing. The report blamed a “technical glitch” for the erasure of those messages, even though it recovered 19,000 texts from the couple sent prior to Mueller being named in the Russia probe. Strzok and Page were the two agents who helped launch that probe, after exchanging anti-Trump texts and talking about an “insurance policy” if Trump actually got elected in 2016, which he did. That “insurance policy” appears to be the claim that the Kremlin assisted Trump’s campaign and helped the president steal the election.
Conveniently, the missing text messages between Strzok and Page were from the time when they both worked for Mueller. Their phones’ memories were cleared after the two left Mueller’s team when it was revealed they were working on the probe and sending anti-Trump texts.
“That should be investigated, damn it, that should be investigated fully. You want a special counsel, get one for that,” Giuliani said on Hill.TV.
Giuliani then compared the erasure of the text messages to the erased tape in President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal when asked if he thought the move was intentional.
“It’s actually worse than Rose Mary Woods [Nixon’s secretary],” he explained. “She erased less than 19 minutes of conversation, but the FBI got rid of more than 19,000 messages.” Thousands more may be deleted forever.