NEW: FBI "loses" evidence in Hillary Clinton email probe

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew well in advance of FBI Director James Comey's 2016 press conference that he would recommend against charging Hillary Clinton, according to information turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Friday.

The revelation was included in 384 pages of text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and it significantly diminishes the credibility of Lynch's earlier commitment to accept Comey's recommendation — a commitment she made under the pretense that the two were not coordinating with each other.

And it gets worse. Comey and Lynch reportedly knew that Clinton would never face charges even before the FBI conducted its three-hour interview with Clinton, which was supposedly meant to gather more information into her mishandling of classified information.

On July 1, 2016, as the Lynch announcement became public, Page texted Strzok:

Page: And yeah, it’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.
There are other revelations within the text messages. But in the cover letter accompanying them, the FBI notified Congress that many additional text messages are missing. According to the FBI, its “technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page from December 14, 2016 to approximately to [sic] May 17, 2017.”

The reason?

(M)any FBI-provided Samsung 5 mobile devices did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities. The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected.

In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray sent yesterday, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the loss of records “concerning.”

Strzok and Page communicated in a voluminous fashion via text message while allegedly having an illicit affair. Strzok was a key figure in the Hillary Clinton exoneration and reportedly interviewed President Trump's former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (which resulted in Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI). Until last summer, Strzok and Page were both members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating the allegations of collusion between ...Read More Here