Probation for ex-FBI lawyer who altered Russia case email
A former FBI lawyer who has admitted doctoring an email during preparations to seek renewed court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide during the Russia investigation was sentenced Friday to one year of probation and 400 hours of community service — but no prison time.
Prosecutors led by John Durham, a special counsel scrutinizing the government’s actions in the Russia investigation, had asked the judge overseeing the high-profile case against the former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, to impose several months of prison time.
But Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the destruction of Clinesmith’s career — and being vilified in a “media hurricane” — had already provided significant punishment and sent a deterrent message.
The surveillance of Carter Page in 2016 and 2017 was a minor part of the overall Russia investigation. But it has become a political flashpoint because the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered numerous errors and omissions in its four court applications.
In June 2017, as the FBI was preparing to seek the final renewal of the order, an FBI official who was going to sign a sworn description of the facts asked Clinesmith to seek clarity from the CIA about whether Page was a source for the agency, as he had claimed.
In fact, Page had spoken to the CIA in the past about his interactions with Russian intelligence agents — a material fact that all four wiretap applications omitted and that might have made him look less suspicious had the court been told about it.
But Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’ ” into a CIA email and showed it to his colleague, which satisfied him and prevented the problem from coming to light internally.
The inspector general referred Clinesmith for a criminal investigation, and the matter was assigned to Durham, a U.S. attorney from Connecticut whom the attorney general at the time, William Barr, had assigned to investigate the Russia investigation.
The Clinesmith case is the only criminal prosecution Durham’s team has brought.
When Clinesmith pleaded guilty last year to making a false statement, he acknowledged he had intentionally altered the email and created a false record.
However, Clinesmith also claimed he did not intentionally mislead his colleague because at the time he believed the words he inserted were accurate.
He had separately told his colleague by text that Page was not a CIA source, but rather a subsource of someone else who had talked to the agency.
In arguing for prison time Friday, prosecutors suggested that Clinesmith’s explanation made no sense and that he must also have known he was misleading his colleagues.