Newly-released texts between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page identity a “secret society” within the FBI that met the day after the 2016 presidential election—in order to plot a way to bring down President Trump.
Rep. John Ratcliffe, who was tasked with reviewing the more than 50,000 texts between Strzok and his mistress, Page, broke the bombshell news on Twitter on Monday evening.
“The thousands of texts [Rep. Trey Gowdy] and I reviewed today revealed manifest bias among top FBI officials. The texts between Strzok and Page referenced a ‘secret society’ working against [Donald Trump],” Ratcliffe wrote.
Other already-released texts sent by Strzok, who had been part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election before being quietly dismissed in August, have also suggested a concentrated effort to bring down the President—namely an “insurance plan” that he, Page, and the FBI’s Deputy Director Andrew McCabe allegedly planned in the event of Trump’s election.
Ratcliffe and Gowdy went on Fox News later Monday night to discuss the bombshell allegations.
In the interview, Ratcliffe also brought up the fact that nearly six months of texts between Strzok and Page had mysteriously gone missing from the FBI’s records—including texts from the initial days of Mueller’s investigation. The FBI has since claimed the lost texts are an honest mistake.
“It is possible these text messages that are missing, perhaps they really were lost,” Ratcliffe said. “Perhaps it is another strange coincidence. It is harder and harder for us to explain one strange coincidence after another.”
“We know that Strzok and Page had an intense anti-Trump bias,” he continued. “And that’s okay, so long as they check it at the door and do their job. We learned today in the thousands of text messages we have reviewed, that perhaps they may not have done that. We know about this ‘insurance policy’ that was referenced trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”
“We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of his election, there may have been a ‘secret society’ of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI, to include Page and Strzok, working against him,” Ratcliffe added. “I’m not saying that actually happened, but when folks speak in those terms, they need to come forward to explain the context.”
Gowdy echoed Ratcliffe’s sentiment, saying that the alleged “secret society” was certainly a cause for alarm.
“You have this insurance policy in Spring 2016, and then the day after the election, what they really didn’t want to have happen, there is a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these supposed to be fact-centric FBI agents saying, ‘Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society,’” said Gowdy. “So I’m going to want to know what secret society you are talking about, because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the electoral college. So yeah — I’m going to want to know.”