Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer Pleads Guilty to Doctoring Email in Russia Inquiry

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/kevin-clinesmith-guilty.html

Version 0 of 1.

WASHINGTON — A former F.B.I. lawyer pleaded guilty on Wednesday to doctoring an email from the C.I.A. that he forwarded to a colleague during preparations in 2017 to ask a court to renew an order to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser, in a case that has attracted intense political attention.

The lawyer, Kevin E. Clinesmith, who was working at the time with the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia investigation team, admitted to a judge that he had intentionally inserted words into the text of the email, which discussed past relations between the C.I.A. and Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.

The alteration was uncovered last year by an inspector general report laying out a litany of errors and omissions in the Page wiretap applications. They included the F.B.I.’s failure to tell judges about Mr. Page’s history of talking to the C.I.A. about his interactions with Russian intelligence officials, a fact that might have made him look less suspicious. The report suggested that Mr. Clinesmith’s move prevented a colleague from recognizing the problem.

At the hearing on Wednesday, which was conducted by videoconference and telephone because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Clinesmith acknowledged that his action met the criteria for an illegal false statement because the original text did not contain the phrase that he added about Mr. Page — “and not a ‘source’” — but also said he believed then that it was true that Mr. Page was not a C.I.A. source.

“At the time, I believed that the information I was providing in the email was accurate,” Mr. Clinesmith said. “But I am agreeing that the information I inserted into the email was not originally there, and I inserted that information.”

Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia set a sentencing hearing for Dec. 10. Sentencing guidelines suggest that Mr. Clinesmith could face a fine and a potential prison term of zero to six months.

Mr. Clinesmith had been referred for criminal investigation by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz. He was charged by John Durham, a U.S. attorney assigned by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize the officials who sought to understand Russia’s covert operation to influence the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, including whether Trump campaign associates knew about or cooperated in that effort.

The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, was eventually handed to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who essentially narrowed its focus to whether crimes were committed. While Mr. Mueller’s report laid out extensive evidence that Russia sought to influence the election and that the Trump campaign welcomed that assistance, he did not find evidence proving a criminal conspiracy between the two.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, after its own three-year investigation that maintained a broader counterintelligence focus, built on those findings this week with a bipartisan report laying out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials. Among them, it said Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort privately shared internal polling data and campaign strategy, was a “Russian intelligence officer” with links to the Kremlin’s election interference operation. Senators said the dynamic “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Mr. Trump has sought to portray such scrutiny as a “hoax” and a plot by the so-called deep state to sabotage him for political reasons. While the Page wiretap was a small piece of the investigation, the president and his allies have sought to conflate the overall effort with it, using the serious problems Mr. Horowitz uncovered with its applications to discredit the entire enterprise.

Mr. Horowitz’s findings that Mr. Clinesmith doctored the email looked especially bad because Mr. Clinesmith was also among several F.B.I. officials whom Mr. Mueller removed from the Trump-Russia investigation after Mr. Horowitz found text messages in which they expressed political animus against Mr. Trump.

Shortly after Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, for example, Mr. Clinesmith texted another official that “the crazies won finally,” while disparaging Mr. Trump’s health care and immigration agendas and calling Vice President Mike Pence “stupid.” Asked by a colleague whether he intended to stay in government, he wrote: “viva la resistance.”

Neither Mr. Horowitz’s report nor Mr. Durham’s court filings explicitly ascribed a motive to Mr. Clinesmith for his actions, but both presented evidence that he had changed the email during a moment of bureaucratic peril for the Page wiretap effort — when the F.B.I. came close to realizing as an institution that something was flawed about all its Page applications.

The applications recounted Mr. Page’s long history of interacting with Russian intelligence officials, even after he learned he had been the target of an apparent recruitment effort in 2013. But what they did not say was that he also had a history of talking to the C.I.A. about some of those interactions, including one of the ones the wiretap applications cited as a reason to be suspicious of him.

In August 2016, two months before the first application, the C.I.A. sent a memo to the F.B.I. saying it had considered Mr. Page from 2008 to 2013 to be an “operational contact,” someone whom the spy agency can debrief but not assign to gather information. Such documents are subject to special restrictions for security reasons, and it is not clear who saw it; although Mr. Clinesmith was entitled to look at it, he said he did not.

In spring 2017, Mr. Page, denying he was a Russian agent, told reporters that he had provided information to the C.I.A. about Russia. An F.B.I. agent who was preparing to sign a factual affidavit to accompany the fourth wiretap application asked Mr. Clinesmith to obtain clarity about whether the C.I.A. considered Mr. Page a “source.”

That led to Mr. Clinesmith’s interactions with a C.I.A. counterpart, who sent back an email referring to Mr. Page’s status as an American citizen and citing the memorandum from August as a place to find more information.

Based on that exchange, Mr. Clinesmith told the agent that the C.I.A. had explicitly said Mr. Page was “never a source,” something his C.I.A. contact later denied saying. When the agent wanted to see it in writing, Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into the email before showing it to his colleague. The agent was satisfied and signed the wiretap affidavit without adding any disclosure about Mr. Page’s relationship with the C.I.A.

Text messages show that Mr. Clinesmith commented to the agent that the clarification he had supposedly received from the C.I.A. was good news because “we don’t have to have a terrible footnote” in the fourth wiretap application.

While Mr. Clinesmith told the inspector general that he meant it would be “laborious” to write a footnote, the agent instead interpreted Mr. Clinesmith to be referring to how bad it would look if Mr. Page had been a C.I.A. asset and the F.B.I. was only then becoming aware of that relationship, rendering the narrative in all its applications “dubious.”

Judge Boasberg did not press Mr. Clinesmith for an explanation at the hearing.