The FBI lawyer under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related to the surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser expressed negative opinions of President Trump in messages to colleagues.
Kevin Clinesmith, who was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, has been identified as the attorney who could face a criminal charge as part of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s expansive criminal inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation, according to the New York Times.
As part of the Justice Department watchdog’s now-completed investigation into alleged surveillance abuses, Clinesmith was found to have altered an email that was used by officials as they prepared an application renewal to present before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to electronically surveil Carter Page, a onetime foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.
Clinesmith was an attorney with the FBI’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch and worked under FBI General Counsel James Baker and Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson. He had worked on the Clinton email investigation as well as the Trump-Russia probe. Clinesmith was present in the FBI’s meeting with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in February 2017 in Chicago, Papadopoulos told lawmakers in 2018. An Australian diplomat’s tip about Papadopoulos claiming the Russians had damaging information about Hillary Clinton effectively prompted the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, called Crossfire Hurricane, in July 2016.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigators found Clinesmith falsely asserted he had documentation to back up a claim while in talks with the Justice Department about the factual basis for a FISA warrant application renewal. He then took an email from an official from another agency that contained multiple factual assertions, added material of his own, and gave it to a fellow FBI official who was preparing an affidavit for the Page case. Clinesmith has been described in many media reports as a “low-level attorney,” but Horowitz said he “was the primary FBI attorney assigned to [the Trump-Russia] investigation in early 2017.”
Eagerly anticipated by Trump’s allies, Howoritz’s report is expected to be released to the public on Dec. 9, the inspector general announced this week. They believe it will reveal an effort to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign in which the FBI misled the FISA court in its reliance on an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, whose research about Trump and his associates was partially funded by Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS.
The Times, however, reported that the inspector general is expected to criticize top FBI officials but absolve them of abusing their power out of bias against Trump. Democrats, as well as current and former FBI officials, have additionally dismissed allegations of wrongdoing and have raised concerns that information about U.S. intelligence-gathering could be leveraged to discredit Mueller.
Horowitz previously identified Clinesmith as one of the FBI officials who conveyed a bias against Trump in instant messages. Clinesmith was kicked out of Mueller’s Russia investigation team in February 2018. Two other FBI officials who were forced out of Mueller’s team for similar anti-Trump messages were Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both of whom have also 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?”
A couple weeks later, on Nov. 22, 2016, he said, “Hell no,” when asked by another FBI attorney if he was “rethink[ing] [his] commitment to the Trump administration.”
“Viva le resistance,” Clinesmith added.
In a scathing July 2018 inspector general report on the FBI’s Clinton emails investigation, Clinesmith was criticized at least 56 times, listed as “FBI Attorney 2.” Clinesmith defended himself, claiming his messages only reflected his personal views. He asserted his opinions did not affect his work.
During a hearing that June with Horowitz, North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows named Clinesmith as being one of two unnamed lawyers criticized in the inspector general report.
The initial FISA application and three renewals targeting Page required the approval of top members of the FBI, the DOJ, 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 the final renewal came in June 2017.
Under suspicion of being a Russian agent, Page became a subject of interest in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which was later wrapped into Mueller’s investigation. Page was never charged with a crime as part of Mueller’s investigation, which failed to establish criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, and denied being an agent for Russia.
Last summer, the DOJ took the unprecedented step of releasing more than 400 redacted pages of top-secret documents on the FISA warrant obtained to wiretap Page after Trump declassified their existence.
“We found instant messages in which FBI Attorney 2 discussed political issues, including three instant message exchanges that raised concerns of potential bias,” Horowitz wrote last year.
The first exchange highlighted by Horowitz occurred on Oct. 28, 2016, just after FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation. Clinesmith messaged a total of four FBI employees expressing his frustration, telling two of them, “I mean, I never really liked the Republic anyway.”
“As I have initiated the destruction of the republic … Would you be so kind as to have a coffee with me this afternoon?” Clinesmith asked a third FBI employee.
And Clinesmith told a fourth FBI employee, “I’m clinging to small pockets of happiness in the dark time of the Republic’s destruction.”
In his attempt to explain these texts to Horowitz in 2018, Clinesmith said he was expressing his annoyance with what he saw as the FBI treating the Clinton email investigation more harshly than the Trump-Russia investigation. He continued to say he didn’t let it impact his work.
“It’s like, in terms of, of, you know, what’s not in here too is like, you know, we, at that point we had investigation, the Russia investigation was ongoing as well. And that information was obviously kept close hold and was not released until March,” Clinesmith said. “So, you know, it, it was just kind of frustration that we weren’t handling both of them the same way with, with that level I guess.”
The second exchange detailed by the inspector general occurred on Nov. 9, 2016, in which he and another FBI official were “devastated” about Trump’s victory over Clinton the day prior, and Clinesmith said he thought the Comey letter to Congress may have helped Trump win, claiming, “We broke the momentum.”
“I am so stressed about what I could have done differently,” Clinesmith said, later adding, “It’s just hard not to feel like the FBI caused some of this. It was razor-thin in some states.”
Clinesmith also trashed Trump and the Republican Party.
“The crazies won finally. This is the Tea Party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years,” he said. “We have to fight this again. Also, Pence is stupid.”
Clinesmith told Horowitz in 2018, “I wasn’t anywhere near the, the room deciding on these factors. … It was just kind of like a discussion on how I could have either moved the process along more quickly or more efficiently at a, at a more, at an earlier time, or whatnot.”
The former FBI lawyer also attempted to explain away his third exchange on Nov. 22, 2016, in which he’d referenced “the Resistance.”
“It’s just the, the lines bled through here just in terms of, of my personal, political view in terms of, of what particular preference I have,” Clinesmith told Horowitz. “But, but that doesn’t have any, any leaning on the way that I, I maintain myself as a professional in the FBI.”
