Can You Unlocked Your Phone

For John, BLUF:  Government records are meant to be preserved.  Laws passed by Congress say so.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Johnson seeks IG probe of wiped Mueller team phones

Here is the sub-headline:

Records released by the Justice Department this week suggest top Mueller aides erased records from at least 15 phones.

From Politico, by Kyle Cheney, 11 September 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson is asking a Justice Department watchdog to probe recently revealed documents that suggest members of special counsel Robert Mueller's team wiped records from their official phones.

Records released by the Justice Department this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request suggest top Mueller aides erased the information from at least 15 phones, citing forgotten passwords, physical damage and missing hardware.

"These reports are troubling and raise concerns about record retention and transparency," Johnson wrote in a letter to DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz.  "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."

Johnson is asking Horowitz to send answers by Sept. 18, as the senator winds down a related investigation of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation — the probe of the 2016 Trump campaign's contacts with Russians, which morphed into Mueller's probe in mid-2017.  He's also asking whether Horowitz may be able to retrieve messages from the phones.

It takes ten (10) bad passcode enries to wipe the phone.  Folks who have these kinds of problems should not be on panels doing investigations for the United States Government.  Surely you wouldn't wish for any of them to be your lawyer.

I don't wish to drag my Daughter, the Statistician, into this, but the likelihood this wasn't deliberate destruction of records is vanishingly small. Not as small as the possibility the Mainstream Media will go after the story, but small enough that no such equivalent event is likely in any other stretch of the universe. >.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff