The FBI has sent or plans to send letters to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page "asking them to preserve agency records on their personal accounts and personal devices and requesting confirmation that they are doing so," according to the conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch.
The FBI informed Judicial Watch they would be making the request as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in which the watchdog was seeking thousands of pages of documents on the personal devices of the pair which could include emails, chats, text messages, and travel documents.
Strzok and Page sent anti-Trump text messages in 2016 while they were working on the Clinton email investigation. Strzok was dismissed from Robert Mueller's special counsel investigating team because of the texts. Strzok and Page were also involved with each other in an extra-marital affair that year, and Page has since left the bureau.
The controversy has evolved to such a point that President Trump singled them out by name in a tweet.
"Lisa Page, who may hold the record for the most Emails in the shortest period of time (to her Lover, Peter S), and attorney Baker, are out at the FBI as part of the Probers getting caught?" President Trump tweeted earlier this month. "Why is Peter S still there? What a total mess. Our Country has to get back to Business!"
According to Judicial Watch, "U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the FBI to begin processing 13,000 pages of previously undisclosed emails exchanged exclusively between FBI officials Strzok and Page between February 1, 2015, and December 2017. The first 500 pages of records are to be processed by June 29, 2018."
The order by Judge Walton is what prompted the FBI to ask for the preservation of records from Strzok and Page.
On Wednesday in a separate move still related to the texts, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) called on the Justice Department to provide him with unredacted versions of some texts between Strzok and Page, one of which said, "the White House is running this." Grassley noted it's not exactly clear what matter the text is referring to.
Grassley is seeking a "fully-unredacted copy of the texts, or at the very least, a redaction key providing the legal justification for the Department's continued refusal to share the requested information with its congressional oversight committee," according to the senator's press release.
"In order to see under the redactions, [Senate Judiciary] Committee staff had to travel to main Justice to review a lesser redacted version," Grassley wrote in the full letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. "When viewing the still redacted portions in context with the unredacted material, it appeared that the redacted portions may contain relevant information relating to the Committee's ongoing investigation into the manner in which the Department of Justice and FBI handled the Clinton and Russia investigations."
The FBI declined to comment, and the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on the developments.