Judicial Watch Lawsuit: FBI Likely Deleted Comey’s and McCabe’s Text Messages in Massive Cover-Up
by Cristina Laila
TheGatewayPundit.com
November 1, 2018
A new lawsuit filed by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch exposes a massive FBI cover-up of its text messages, “which are government records and are, by the thousands, likely to have been deleted and lost by FBI employees,” says Tom Fitton.
Judicial Watch announced Thursday it filed lawsuits regarding the maintenance of text messages as federal records and for records of the audit of communications of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Via Judicial Watch:
“After the FBI claimed that text messages are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Judicial Watch filed suit to ensure that text messages are being preserved. The new Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit against the FBI challenges the FBI failure to preserve FBI text messages as required by the Federal Records Act. (Judicial Watch v. FBI (No.1:18-cv-02316)).
In its lawsuit Judicial Watch points to a related case in which Michael G. Seidel, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section in the FBI’s Information Management Division, stated: “text messages on [FBI]-issued devices are not automatically integrated into an FBI records system.” (Danik v. U.S. Department of Justice, (No. 1:17-cv-01792)).
Judicial Watch argued that the FBI “does not have a recordkeeping program in place that provides effective controls over the maintenance of electronic messages, including text messages.” Moreover, “The FBI relies upon its personnel to incorporate their text messages into a recordkeeping system. If FBI personnel do not actively incorporate their text messages into a recordkeeping system, the text messages are not preserved.”
Judicial Watch asked the court to declare the FBI’s failure to have a recordkeeping program for electronic messages to be “not in accordance with law” and that the court order the FBI “to establish and maintain a recordkeeping program that provides effective controls over the maintenance of electronic messages.”
If text messages are not preserved, then they may be deleted and never produced to Congress, criminal investigators, and to the American people under FOIA.
The Rest…HERE
