WASHINGTON _ The Justice Department now says it has recovered some of the missing text messages between two FBI officials who have become a focus for Republican charges of bias in the FBI.
Last week, the department reported that, because of a technical snafu, the FBI had lost all messages sent from bureau mobile phones from December 2016 to May 2017. That included a string of messages between Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who had worked on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
Text messages released in December show the pair exchanged strings of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump and other politicians during the campaign. Strzok, who also was assigned to the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, was reassigned after the texts surfaced earlier last year.
Trump, who has claimed the texts show evidence of bias against him, has worked to focus attention on the issue, tweeting Tuesday that the missing texts were "one of the biggest stories in a long time."
In a letter sent Thursday to the chairs of the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office had successfully used forensic tools to recover some of the text messages between Strzok and Page.
"Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing," he wrote.
The letter did not say how many messages had been recovered, or say anything about their content. The messages will be reviewed by the department before they are released, Horowitz wrote.
