WASHINGTON – A former FBI attorney pleads guilty to forgery of a document as part of an agreement with prosecutors conducting their own criminal investigation into the Russian investigation, according to three people familiar with the case .
The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, 38, who was assigned to the Russia investigation, plans to let him change an email from the CIA that trusts investigators to seek renewed court permission in 2017 for a secret wiretapping on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had occasionally provided information to the spy agency. Mr Clinesmith’s lawyers said he made a mistake in trying to explain facts to a colleague, people said.
Mr. Clinesmith had written texts expressing opposition to President Trump, who is sure to prove the plea agreement as proof that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and politically motivated. Mr. Trump has long been blunt to see the ongoing investigation by the prosecutor who investigated the previous poll, John H. Durham, as a political reward whose fruits he would like to reveal in the weeks leading up to the election.
Attorney General William P. Barr praised the work of Mr. Durham was portrayed as correcting what he sees as injustice by officials who in 2016 sought to understand links between the Trump campaign and Russia’s secret operation to explore in the election.
But prosecutors were not expected to disclose evidence in loaded documents showing Mr Clinesmith’s actions were part of any broader conspiracy to undermine Mr Trump, the people said. And the Independent Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael E. Horowitz, found that law enforcement officials had enough reason to open the Russia investigation, known within the FBI as Crossfire Hurricane, and found no evidence that they dealing with political bias.
As part of their effort to dissuade prosecutors from charging Mr Clinesmith, his lawyers claimed his motives were benevolent, and other evidence indicated that he had not hidden the CIA email from his colleagues, the people said.
Mr Clinesmith would be charged in the federal court in Washington with a single count of making a false statement. He did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mr Durham declined to comment.
Mr. Barr had announced Thursday night the agreement on Fox News ” Hannity ” examples, announcing that there would be a development in the investigation on Friday. “It’s not an earth-splitting evolution, but it’s an indication that things are moving at the right pace, as determined by the facts in this study,” he said.
It is quite unusual for law enforcement officials to talk publicly about ongoing investigations, but Mr Barr has long made clear his distance from the Russia investigation and his opinion that Mr Durham would remove any problems with it.
Although the sprawling Russian investigation that was eventually conducted by a special adviser, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed the Kremlin’s complex operation to undermine the election and the Trump campaign’s expectation that it would benefit from foreign involvement Republicans seized on a narrow aspect of the poll – the investigation into Mr. Page – in a long running question to undermine it.
An energy manager with contacts in Russia, Mr. Page was brought in to advise on the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016 as the candidate solidified his unexpected lead in the Republican primary race and scrambled to cobble together a foreign policy team.
Investigators eventually suspected that Russian spies were marking Mr Page for recruitment. They first received permission from the mysterious foreign intelligence watchdog in October 2016 to tap him, and the court decided to extend the order three times in subsequent months.
After Republicans became concerned about the information that investigators trusted to seek court approval to hear on Page., Mr. Horowitz began an exhaustive review of the process.
In a report released last year, Mr Horowitz revealed that the requests were met with serious errors and omissions. Among other things, he had learned from a difficult series of events in which the association of Mr. Page with the CIA was not precisely transferred to the Justice Department and was eventually retained by the judges who approved the warnings for surveillance.
Mr. Page had provided information to the CIA for years about his contacts with Russian officials. In CIA jargon, he was known as an operational contact – someone who agrees to be debriefed by agency personnel but cannot be assigned to gather information.
That relationship may have given law enforcement officials reason to be less suspicious of him. And the FBI was told about it: A CIA lawyer provided a list of documents in the email in August 2016 at the heart of the case against Mr. Clinesmith that the relationship of Mr. Page with the agency explained.
But an FBI agent who learned about Mr. Page to the CIA played them off while preparing the first wiretap application, according to the Inspector General’s report. At the time, Mr. Clinesmith was not involved in determining whether Mr. Page was a CIA source, people said.
But later in 2017, a FBI agent investigating the third and final renewal application asked Mr. Clinesmith for a definitive answer to the question of whether Mr. Page was a source from an agency, according to Mr Horowitz’s report.
Mr Clinesmith wrongly said that Mr. Page “was never a source” and sent the CIA information to the supervisor. He changed the original email to say that Mr. Page had not been a source – a material change to a document used in a federal investigation.
The agent relied on the amended email to file the application and is seeking further court permission for Mr. Page to wiretap, wrote the inspector general. By changing the email and then forwarding it, Mr Clinesmith misrepresented the original content of the document, which prosecutors said was a crime.
Mr Clinesmith did not change the document in an attempt to cover up the FBI’s error, people familiar with the matter said. His lawyers claimed he had made the change in good faith because he did not think Mr. Page had been an actual source for the CIA
Mr Clinesmith’s lawyers also claimed that their client did not try to conceal the CIA email from other law enforcement officials because they were seeking the final renewal of the Page wiretap. Mr Clinesmith had delivered the unusual CIA email to Crossfire Hurricane agents and the Attorney General’s Attorney draws up the original wiretap application.
Mr Clinesmith had also called on investigators to send all information about a meeting of an informant in October 2016 with Mr. Page, including all exculpatory statements, to the Attorney General’s Attorney drafting the application of wiretap. Mr Clinesmith said this was “probably the most important” information to provide to the lawyer drafting the wiretap application.
Mr. Clinesmith was among the FBI officials who removed Mr Mueller from the Russia investigation after Mr Horowitz found messages they had exchanged to express political animosity against Mr Trump. Shortly after Mr Trump’s election victory, Mr Clinesmith slammed another official: ‘I honestly think there will be a lot more gun problems, even the crazy ones won in the end. This is the tea party about steroids. And the GOP will be lost. ”
In another text he wrote, “viva le resistance.”
Mr. Clinesmith told the inspector general that he expressed his personal views, but did not let them affect his work.
Mr Clinesmith is also pleading against the prospect of wiretapping another former Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, who spent two weeks in prison on a charge of lying to the FBI, according to the Horowitz report. The inspector general said the bureau never tried to investigate him.
Mr Clinesmith’s prosecution is just one aspect of Mr Durham’s extensive investigation. He also examined the intelligence community’s most explosive conclusion about Russian interference in the 2016 elections: that President Vladimir V. Putin intervened to benefit Mr. Trump.
Mr. Durham has also investigated the use of a notorious dossier in the wiretap applications compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele.
Mr. Durham, who has previously investigated FBI and CIA misconduct, did not tip his hand over what he found, although Mr Barr said some of the findings were “troublesome.” Mr Durham said in a rare statement that he did not agree with some of Mr’s conclusions. Horowitz on how and why the FBI opened the investigation in the summer of 2016.
