A former lawyer with the FBI plans to plead guilty Friday to falsifying a key document related to surveillance against a onetime Trump campaign associate as part of a deal with U.S. Attorney John Durham.
Kevin Clinesmith, who worked on both the Hillary Clinton emails investigation and the Trump-Russia inquiry, will admit that he falsified a document during the bureau’s targeting of Carter Page, according to multiple reports. Clinesmith, 38, claimed in early 2017 that Page was “not a source” for the CIA when the CIA had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was an operational contact for them — a falsehood used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal against Page. Durham submitted a five-page filing to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, noting Clinesmith was being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(3) for “False Statements.”
Attorney General William Barr had hinted at a “development” in Durham’s investigation during a Fox News interview on Thursday night.
Clinesmith’s responsibilities during the Trump-Russia investigation included communicating with “another specific United States government agency,” which is believed to be the CIA, as well as providing support to the FBI special agents working with the Justice Department’s National Security Division to pursue FISA warrants and renewals against Page.
Durham noted on Friday that the first three FISAs didn’t include Page’s relationship with the CIA and wrote that Page went public to claim that he had helped the CIA in the past prior to the FBI’s submission of fourth FISA.
In June 2017, Clinesmith was tasked by a special agent for the bureau with determining whether Page had ever been a “source” for the CIA. A liaison at the CIA reminded Clinesmith that the agency had already told the FBI in August 2016 that Page had been an “operational contact” for the agency for years and that Page had provided the CIA with information, but Clinesmith falsely relayed to the FBI agent that the CIA had explicitly told him Page was “never a source,” according to a DOJ inspector general report released in December. Clinesmith then altered an email from the CIA to claim that Page was “not a source.” The FBI agent relied upon that fraudulent information when signing the final Page FISA, and the FISA court was never told about Page’s potentially exculpatory work for the U.S. government.
“On or about June 19, 2017, within the District of Columbia, the defendant, Kevin Clinesmith, did willfully and knowingly make and use a false wiring and document, knowing the same to contain a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and entry in a matter before the jurisdiction of the executive branch and judicial branch of the Government of the United States,” Durham said in the federal court filing.
“Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email,” Clinesmith attorney Emily Damrau told the Washington Examiner. “It was never his intent to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information he relayed was accurate. But Kevin understands what he did was wrong and accepts responsibility.”
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh responded to the charges against Clinesmith, saying, “It’s a good step in the right direction that an FBI official and key member of Robert Mueller’s team of angry Democrats is pleading guilty to doctoring evidence to further the illegal spying operation against President Trump.”
Clinesmith, an assistant general counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel from July 12, 2015 through Sept. 21, 2019, is not directly named in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, but it is clear he is the “Office of General Counsel attorney” who had been acting in response to a question by an FBI agent who was part of the team investigating the Trump campaign.
SSA 2, who swore in an affidavit for all three FISA renewals against Page in 2017, told Horowitz’s investigators that on the third renewal, he wanted “a definitive answer to whether Page had ever been a source for another U.S. government agency before he signed the final renewal application.”
While in contact with what was reportedly the CIA’s liaison, Clinesmith was reminded that in August 2016, predating the first Page warrant application in October 2016, the other agency informed the FBI that Page “did, in fact, have a prior relationship with that other agency.”
An email from the other government agency’s liaison was sent to Clinesmith, who then “altered the liaison’s email by inserting the words ‘not a source’ into it, thus making it appear that the liaison had said that Page was ‘not a source’ for the other agency” and sent it to “Supervisory Special Agent 2,” Horowitz found.
“Relying upon this altered email, SSA 2 signed the third renewal application that again failed to disclose Page’s past relationship with the other agency,” the inspector general wrote.
In a section on “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the Page FISA, Horowitz said the FBI left out that Page had been approved as an “operational contact” for the CIA from 2008 to 2013 and that Page “had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application.” Horowitz also found this other agency gave Page a “positive assessment,” which was not included in the FISA warrant applications.
Clinesmith’s lawyers, according to the New York Times, “argued that their client did not try to hide the CIA email from other law enforcement officials” and “had provided the unchanged CIA email to Crossfire Hurricane agents and the Justice Department lawyer drafting the original wiretap application.”
Judge Rosemary Collyer, then the presiding judge over the FISA court, ordered an FBI review of every FISA filing that Clinesmith had ever touched following the release of Horowitz’s report. The FISA court criticized the FBI’s handling of the Page applications as “antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above” and demanded corrective action from the bureau.
The initial FISA application and three renewals targeting Page required the approval of top members of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but they were also handled by lower-level officials. The initial warrant application was approved in October 2016, and renewals came at three-month intervals in January, April, and June 2017. Page, who has denied being an agent for Russia, was never charged with a crime as part of Robert Mueller’s investigation, which failed to establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Clinesmith worked under former FBI General Counsel James Baker and former Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson. He was present at the FBI’s meeting in Chicago with Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in February 2017, Papadopoulos told lawmakers. An Australian diplomat’s tip about Papadopoulos telling him that he had heard the Russians had damaging information about Clinton is what officials say prompted the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane,” in late July 2016. Barr and Durham have disputed the legitimacy of the investigation’s launch.
Recently declassified FBI documents show the counterintelligence briefing the bureau gave to Donald Trump and his national security team during the 2016 campaign was used as a pretext to gather investigative evidence on the Trump campaign and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and Clinesmith signed off on the electronic communication detailing the pretextual briefing.
In a scathing July 2018 inspector general report on the FBI’s Clinton emails investigation, Clinesmith was mentioned — again, not by name — numerous times as being one of the FBI officials who conveyed a possible bias against Trump in instant messages, along with Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, both of whom have left the bureau.
In a lengthy instant message exchange between Clinesmith and another FBI employee on Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Trump’s presidential victory, he lamented Trump’s win and worried about the role he played in the investigation into Trump and his campaign. “My god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating his staff,” Clinesmith said, adding, “So, who knows if that breaks to him what he is going to do?”
Other messages showed Clinesmith, listed in Horowitz’s report as “FBI Attorney 2,” expressed favor toward Clinton and said “Viva le resistance” in the weeks after Trump’s win.
The July 2018 report shows Clinesmith claimed his messages reflected only his personal views and that his work was unaffected by them; Horowitz ultimately was unable to find that “improper considerations, including political bias,” influenced any investigative decisions.
Horowitz’s December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page and for the bureau’s reliance on the Democrat-funded discredited dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele. Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicate the bureau became aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
The DOJ watchdog called the FBI’s explanations for these mistakes “unsatisfactory across the board” and testified he wasn’t sure if the errors were “gross incompetence” or “intentional.”
In January, the Justice Department determined that the final two of the four Page FISA warrants “were not valid.” The FBI told the court it was working to “sequester” all the information from the Page wiretaps, and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress he was working to “claw back” that intelligence. The FBI director also testified that the bureau likely illegally surveilled Page.
“After several years, Kevin Clinesmith is finally being held accountable and pleading guilty to committing a felony for his involvement in the plot to falsely portray me and, by implication, the Trump administration as traitors. The actions by the full band of government officials and Democrat operatives involved in the creation of the false applications for my FISA surveillance warrants were entirely unconscionable,” Page said in a statement shared with the Washington Examiner.
“Clinesmith, his organization, and their associates put my very life at risk, leading to abusive calls and death threats because of my personal opinions and support for President Trump,” Page added. “There is a long way to go on the road to restoring justice in America, but certainly, a good first step has now been taken.”
