FBI's Peter Strzok: Trump inquiry 'maybe the most important case of our lives'

WASHINGTON— While weighing the prospect of joining special counsel Robert Mueller’s team last year, a top FBI counter-intelligence official described the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as a case destined for “the history books. ”

Peter Strzok, subsequently removed from Mueller’s staff last summer for disparaging President Trump in text messages, referred to the inquiry as “maybe the most important case of our lives," according to a new release of his communications with FBI lawyer Lisa Page. 

The latest batch of texts, released Tuesday by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, suggest Strzok expressed some skepticism about the inquiry just two days after Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. 

“I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern (that) there’s no big there there,” Strzok said in the May 19 message, before he joined Mueller's staff. 

The release of two pages of text messages exchanged between the two officials comes a day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged that the FBI’s information system failed to preserve five months of text messages between the two officials, both of whom had worked on Mueller’s staff.

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Strzok, who also helped run the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, was removed after the Justice Department’s inspector general first discovered texts in which Strzok and Page were harshly critical of Trump—in one message referring to him as an “idiot.”

The texts released Tuesday, all dated just two days after Mueller’s July 17 appointment, were not among those lost to the FBI’s faulty storage system which Trump pointed out on Twitter.

"In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI now says it is missing five months worth of lovers Strzok-Page texts, perhaps 50,000, and all in prime time. Wow!," Trump tweeted Tuesday. He later appeared to call out Samsung for the missing messages.

Late Monday, Sessions said the Justice Department's inspector general already was examining the breakdown, resulting in the loss of text messages transmitted between the two, from Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017.

Republican lawmakers have seized on the text communications to question the credibility of Muller's continuing inquiry and to call for a second special counsel to examine the FBI's handling of the investigation. 

Johnson said Strzok's texts suggest a "shocking" bias against Trump.

“It’s saying that his gut sense that 'there’s no big there there' when it comes to the Mueller special counsel investigation," the committee chairman said Tuesday on a Milwaukee radio program. "He doesn’t really want to join that because his gut sense is 'there’s no big there there.' I think that’s kind of shocking."

The texts made public Tuesday represent only a small sampling of a second tranche of communications recently provided to Congress. In the first batch, turned over last month, both FBI officials showed a clear preference for Democratic presidential nominee Clinton. 

In a statement Monday, the Republican chairmen of three influential House panels – the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees – said they were concerned with the missing communications.

The lost messages, the chairmen said, represent a "critical gap encompassing the FBI's Russia investigation." 

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