wsj.com Former FBI Lawyer Expected to Plead Guilty to Altering Email on
Trump Aide Surveillance Byron Tau 7-9 minutes

WASHINGTON—A former FBI lawyer is expected to plead guilty on a charge
of altering a document used to seek the continued surveillance of a
former Trump campaign adviser, the first criminal charge stemming from
a long-running review of the actions of investigators who worked on the
politically charged probe.

Kevin Clinesmith, an attorney who worked with Federal Bureau of
Investigation agents on some of the surveillance warrants against the
onetime foreign-policy adviser, Carter Page, will plead guilty to a
false statement charge involving an email, according to documents filed
in federal court on Friday.

Mr. Page was the subject of a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act in 2016 and 2017 over suspicions about his contacts
with Russia. Mr. Page was never charged with a crime and investigators
didn’t find evidence of any coordination between him and any Russian
agents during the election campaign.

“Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email. It was never his intent
to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information
he relayed was accurate. But Kevin understands what he did was wrong and
accepts responsibility,” Mr. Clinesmith’s lawyer said in a statement.

The charge was brought by John Durham, a Connecticut prosecutor who was
tapped last year by Attorney General William Barr to review the way the
FBI and the Justice Department conducted the 2016 probe into several
associates of President Trump.

It represents the most serious official action yet taken against the
investigators who handled the probe into Mr. Trump during the 2016
election. Mr. Trump called the investigation into his campaign “the
single biggest political crime in the history of our country” in an
interview with Fox Business this week.

“That’s just the beginning, I would imagine,” Mr. Trump told
reporters at the White House on Friday. He called it a “terrible
thing.”

Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign by the time the surveillance began.

An FBI spokesperson said the agency had and would continue to cooperate
with Mr. Durham’s review. “While the FBI does not comment on
ongoing legal matters, it is important to note the employee in this
case no longer works at the FBI” and resigned “before an internal
disciplinary process was completed,” the spokesperson said.

Mr. Barr said this week he expected to be able to reveal some of
Mr. Durham’s findings before the November election. “We’ll develop
this case to the extent we can before the election, and we’ll use our
prudent judgment to decide what’s appropriate before the election and
what should wait until after the election,” he said.

Mr. Clinesmith, who was then serving as assistant general counsel at the
FBI, stands charged with altering an email related to an application to
renew a warrant seeking court approval to monitor Mr. Page. According
to the charging documents, FBI agents had asked Mr. Clinesmith to find
out if Mr. Page had ever been a source to another government agency.

The agency isn’t identified in the court documents, but The Wall Street
Journal previously reported that it was the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to court records and people familiar with the case,
Mr. Clinesmith received an email from the CIA explaining that Mr. Page had
been approved as an operational contact and had provided some information
to the agency in the past. At the time, the FBI was seeking to renew
its surveillance warrant into Mr. Page and felt it needed to clarify
his relationship with any other government agencies.

A CIA official told Mr. Clinesmith in an email that Mr. Page “was
or is” an operational contact and offered to provide the FBI more
information. Mr. Clinesmith forwarded that email to an FBI agent and
added the phrase “and not a ‘source’ ” to the email, making it
look like that language had come from the CIA.

In making the change, Mr. Clinesmith appeared to be drawing a distinction
between a CIA “source” and a “contact” based on the agency’s
definitions.

The status of operation contact “allows the agency to contact
and discuss sensitive information with a U.S. person and to collect
information from that person via ‘passive debriefing,’ or debriefing
a person of information that is within the knowledge of an individual
and has been acquired through the normal course of that individual’s
activities,” according to a Justice Department inspector general report
on the surveillance into Mr. Page released last year.

Operation contacts can’t be assigned by the agency to actively collect
information or undertake other activities on behalf of the CIA, as
someone with a more formal relationship with the agency might be able to.

At the time, Mr. Page was a businessman who traveled extensively—making
him a potentially valuable source of information for the CIA. He also had
previously been approached by people believed to be Russian intelligence
agents in 2013. He detailed contacts with possible Russian intelligence
officers to both the FBI and the CIA.

That the CIA had approved using him as a contact was information that cut
against the FBI’s assertion that there was probable cause to believe
he was an agent of a foreign power, the standard to get a surveillance
warrant against Mr. Page. Four separate judges approved those surveillance
warrants against Mr. Page. The inclusion of such information might have
undercut the warrant application.

The surveillance of Mr. Page has been one of the most controversial
actions taken by the FBI. It was the subject of a nearly 500 page
inspector general report that found “serious performance failures”
in the numerous warrant applications used to surveil Mr. Page.

“After several years, Kevin Clinesmith is finally being held accountable
and pleading guilty to committing a felony for his involvement in the
plot to falsely portray me and by implication the Trump Administration
as traitors. The actions by the full band of government officials and
Democrat operatives involved in the creation of the false applications
for my FISA surveillance warrants were entirely unconscionable,” said
Mr. Page in a statement through his publicists.

Mr. Clinesmith, 38 years old, worked on national-security issues for
the FBI. He played a part in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s
handling of classified information, as well as in the early stages of
the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election,
the Journal previously reported.

That put him at the center of two politically explosive investigations
whose fallout continues to rock the FBI. Mr. Clinesmith interviewed
another Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, in
February 2017 in Chicago, according to Mr. Papadopoulos’s congressional
testimony.

The false-statement charge against Mr. Clinesmith is a felony that
carries a maximum of five years in prison; however, most first-time
offenders typically get far less.

A top Senate Intelligence Committee staffer was sentenced in 2018 to
two months in prison on a similar charge of lying. Former CIA director
David Petraeus avoided jail time on the same charge, receiving two years
of probation.