New DOJ documents show wholesale destruction of evidence by Mueller team - 30 phones 'accidentally' wiped!

Kylee Zempet
The Federalist
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC

© The White House/Wikimedia Commons

Robert Mueller

Newly released records from the Department of Justice reveal that multiple top members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team claim to have "accidentally wiped" data off phones they used during the anti-Trump probe.

Many devices were wiped or otherwise disabled before DOJ authorities were able to access and examine them or the records they contained, including that of disgraced former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

According to email correspondence between the Special Counsel's Office and the DOJ Office of the Inspector General, Page's phone had been reset to factory settings, "and therefore all data was wiped from the device" before the OIG received it.

Destruction of data and communication pervaded the team, with more than 20 instances of Mueller team members wiping their devices, some in seemingly creative ways. While some data was "accidentally wiped," other inaccessible data was blamed on personnel incorrectly entering passwords too many times, resulting in information being nuked. Other devices were left in airplane mode with either incorrect or no passwords provided, rendering the data inaccessible.

One particularly notable name on the list is Andrew Weissmann, the lead Mueller prosecutor the New York Times referred to as the special counsel's "pit bull." After working under Mueller at the FBI as general counsel, Weissmann led the government's case against former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort.

According to DOJ records, upon a March 2018 review, Weissmann had "entered password too many times and wiped his phone." On another occasion, by September of that year, Weissmann had again "accidentally wiped cell phone — data lost," according to the records.

Records show prosecutor Kyle Freeny's phone was "accidentally wiped" prior to records review, and James Quarles' phone allegedly "wiped itself without intervention from him." A number of devices cited forgotten passwords as the reason for data destruction, including those of assistant special counsel Greg Andre and deputy Rush Atkinson.

It seems unlikely that more than a dozen top Mueller officials all put their phones into airplane mode, locked them, and forgot the passwords or "accidentally" wiped their devices. Considering that the Russian collusion probe has revealed nothing but the depths of bureaucratic corruption and dishonesty and a shamelessly anti-Trump agenda from the start, the odds seem even lower.

Comment: Who knew phone wiping was so contagious? The 'mask of justice' has just been ripped off this case and those phonies may require cellular distancing.

An 87-page document, released by the Justice Department on Thursday under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals that Mueller's investigators "accidentally" or deliberately wiping their devices when the DOJ inspector-general asked for them.

As many as 31 phones may have been affected, including the devices that had been "reassigned."

Weissman was Mueller's principal deputy. He is generally considered to have actually been in charge of the 'Russiagate' probe, especially after the former FBI director couldn't recall much of anything during his July 2019 testimony before Congress.

Another discovery in the document was that the phone belonging to FBI lawyer Lisa Page got "lost" by the Mueller team, and the name of the official who had custody of it: Christopher Greer. It was eventually retrieved, but the IG report found that it had been wiped two weeks after Page had left the special counsel team.

UPDATE: Trump tweets:

The Republican chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee is calling for an investigation:

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) penned a letter to the Justice Department on Friday, asking DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz to launch a probe after documents surfaced this week showing that Mueller's team scrubbed information from up to 31 devices amid the Russiagate investigation.

"These reports are troubling and raise concerns about record retention and transparency," Johnson wrote.

Therefore, I respectfully request that your office open an investigation into this matter to determine what, why, and how information was wiped, whether any wrongdoing occurred, and who these devices belonged to

Asking the DOJ to respond within a week's time, Johnson also called on the department to answer a number of specific queries about the phones, including when Justice officials became aware that they had been wiped, and whether data could still be retrieved from the devices.