On Tuesday, Trump again took to Twitter to attack the Mueller investigation. He evidently is now running scared, because this tweet brought up the old theme of text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Trump claimed that 19,000 of those texts had been "purposely and illegally deleted", and if they hadn't been deleted they would have shown the Mueller investigation to be nothing more than a hoax.
There's only one thing wrong with his tweet -- IT'S A LIE! Just like many of his other tweets, it doesn't even have a distant relationship with the truth. No texts were "purposely and illegally deleted", and most of the lost texts have been recovered. And none of them back up Trump's hoax claim.
Here's what PolitiFact concluded after examining Trump's claim:
Trump said 19,000 text messages exchanged between former FBI officials that were "purposely and illegally deleted ... would have explained (the special counsel investigation) hoax."
The Justice Department inspector general’s report suggests the texts slipped through the cracks due to technical glitches with the FBI’s data-collection tool, not because Strzok and Page deliberately deleted them.
An outside expert hired by the inspector general concluded "it was unlikely that Strzok and Page attempted to circumvent the FBI's text message collection capabilities," and the watchdog found no evidence they did.
Trump’s suggestion that the messages are permanently lost is wrong. The OIG recovered more than 19,000 messages from the government-issued Samsung phones of Strzok and Page, totaling more than 126,000 lines of text.
And lastly, there is no evidence the texts show that the special counsel investigation is, as Trump called it, a "hoax."
We rate this claim Pants on Fire.
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