A Justice Department spokeswoman said Thursday that it’s unclear whether a text message between two FBI employees referring to a “secret society” was serious or done in jest.
“It’s unclear. That’s why we wait for an inspector general report, who is investigating this,” Sarah Isgur Flores told CNN’s “New Day.”
Conservatives have seized on the text exchange between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok, which was sent after the 2016 presidential election, as potential evidence of an anti-Donald Trump bias at the FBI. Strzok was a member of the FBI team investigating Hillary Clinton’s email server and, later, a member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel operation looking into Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election.
ABC News obtained a copy of the text message that Republicans appear to be referring to. The report said that from the message, it’s not clear whether the reference to a “secret society” was a joke.
“Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society,” Page wrote to Strzok, according to ABC. The report said the text had no relation to others sent before or after it, which makes it harder to decipher the context.