You may recall last week the Justice Department announced that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith is expected to plead guilty this week to one count of falsifying a warrant application to the FISA court so the FBI could continue spying on one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Turns out that Clinesmith lied about Page’s status as a CIA asset; the former lawyer said he wasn’t on the application when in fact, Page was an asset.
That said, constitutional law professor and all-around fair-and-balanced political observer Jonathan Turley made some interesting observations in a piece published Sunday in The Hill regarding Clinesmith’s plea, which will be the first conviction obtained by U.S. Attorney John Durham, who has been conducting a criminal investigation into the origins of Spygate.
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After noting that Democrats have dismissed the plea agreement out of hand while proclaiming that Durham’s probe is all political and is being conducted solely on behalf and to the benefit of President Trump, Turley noted that the timing of Clinesmith’s nefarious and illegal act was “key.”
Turley wrote:
This is a plea agreement so it is not known what information Clinesmith may have shared. Moreover, this is just the first public move by Durham, just as Flynn was the early salvo for Mueller. But the date of this criminal false statement is key. In September 2016, administration officials leaked the existence of the classified investigation in the midst of the campaign and suggested Trump adviser Carter Page was a Russian agent.
This secret surveillance started the next month, based on that allegation against Page, when he was in fact an American asset. The FISA court was never told that information in the surveillance application was derived in part from the dossier, or that it was paid for by the opposition campaign. Nor was it told that at the time, FBI agents challenged both the bias and credibility for the dossier author and past British spy Christopher Steele, who was known to have given interviews for the media and claimed that he was trying to defeat Trump and assist the Clinton campaign.
“In January 2017, Trump was inaugurated and FBI agents had sought to end their investigation of Flynn, citing no evidence of a crime. However, Strzok evidently wanted the collusion investigation to remain open and, later that month, Clinesmith also sought to renew that surveillance order over Page. His FISA application expressly cited the Steele dossier and described it as credible, despite knowing the different findings by FBI agents,” he added.
“In February 2017, there were more leaks about alleged collusion by Trump officials with the Russians, a claim that even Strzok said was unsupported. The FBI was finding no evidence of collusion, while there was pressure to end the investigation,” Turley pointed out.
But as we know, the FBI probe begun during the Obama administration did not end.
In June of that year, Clinesmith would falsify an email in a third FISA court application, and “what he was able to hide from the court was incredible,” the George Washington University law professor noted.
According to the application, Page might be a Russian agent as part of a conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2016 election in favor of Trump – when in reality, Clinesmith was informed that Page was an asset for the CIA “who was working by meeting with Russians,” Turley said.
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“When Clinesmith took this criminal action, the Russia collusion theory had already fallen apart,” he added.
“So we have a collusion investigation that was shown to be based on false or unreliable information. It was launched and maintained by officials who were accused by an inspector general of misconduct, false statements, or procedural errors,” Turley summarized.
“Today we have the actual criminal guilty plea. However, many voices in Washington continue to insist that there are no reasons for Durham to continue digging.”
That’s unbelievable.
