Saturday, November 23, 2019

FBI Agent Busted for Altering an Email to Renew Wiretap on Trump Foreign Policy Adviser

Kevin Clinesmith
They are setting up a fall guy.


Here is what is publicly available via The New York Times at present about the investigation surrounding FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith.

  • Clinesmith is an attorney 
  • He is under criminal investigation for allegedly altering an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap on Carter Page who was at the time a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump.
  • DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has referred his findings about Clinesmith to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge.
  • Clinesmith took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding. He included this altered email in a package that he compiled for another F.B.I. official to read in preparation for signing an affidavit that would be submitted to the court attesting to the facts and analysis in the wiretap application.
  • The details of the email are apparently classified and may not be made public even when the report is unveiled.
  • Clinesmith worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia investigation. 
  • He was among the F.B.I. officials removed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after  Horowitz found text messages expressing political animus against Trump.
One of the George Papadopoulos interviews was run by Clinesmith
The idea that Clinesmith was a low-level attorney is catching hold. But the June 2018 OIG report describes him as the "primary FBI attorney" on Trump-Russia probe as of early 2017.
and
He's the one who sent the "Viva la Resistance" email [to an anti-Trump colleague in the FBI.]

-RW

1 comment: