August 16, 2020
Some Matters Domestic and Foreign
By Clarice Feldman
Attorney General William Barr earlier this week signaled that there would be a development in the ongoing Durham investigation into official misconduct relating to the Russiagate confection. Friday, that came true with news that attorney Kevin Clinesmith, formerly with the FBI, was going to plead guilty to one count of feloniously altering an email from the CIA in order to support an application for a FISA warrant that permitted the government to spy in Carter Page.
Page had for years provided information to the CIA 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 collect information.
That relationship might 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 August 2016 email at the heart of the case against Clinesmith that explained Page’s relationship with the agency.
But an FBI case agent who learned about Page’s ties to the CIA played them down while preparing the first wiretap application, according to the inspector general’s report. At the time, Clinesmith was not involved in determining whether Page was a CIA source, people familiar with the case said.
But later in 2017, a supervisory FBI agent handling the third and final renewal application asked Clinesmith for a definitive answer on whether Page had been an agency source, according to Horowitz’s report.
Clinesmith incorrectly said Page was “never a source†and sent the CIA’s information to the supervisor. He altered the original email to say Page had not been a source -- a material change to a document used in a federal investigation.
The agent relied on the altered email to submit the application seeking further court permission to wiretap Page, the inspector general wrote. By changing the email and then forwarding it, Clinesmith misrepresented the original content of the document, which prosecutors said was a crime.
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http://americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/some_matters_domestic_and_foreign.html
