A newly released document from Sen. Chuck Grassley adds a significant and troubling dimension to what was previously known about the conduct of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, a central figure in the surveillance of Trump campaign associates during the Russia collusion investigation. Clinesmith had already pleaded guilty to falsifying evidence in connection with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The new information shows that his misconduct was not limited to a single target, but was part of a broader, systematic pattern of abuse that extended to another investigation against Trump adviser Walid Phares.
Phares, a scholar of jihadist ideology who advised both the Romney campaign in 2012 and the Trump campaign in 2016, has received far less public attention than Page. Yet the newly disclosed material reveals that the same investigative approach was applied in his case. The Grassley document shows that Clinesmith played a central role in the FISA process targeting Phares over alleged foreign ties. As with the Page surveillance, the Phares warrants were repeatedly renewed, even though investigators had found no evidence supporting the allegations.
What makes this especially troubling is not simply that the investigations came up empty, but that Clinesmith knew they had while the surveillance was still ongoing, according to the whistleblower cited in Grassley’s letter. Rather than ensuring that the court and the Department of Justice were fully and accurately informed, the newly uncovered report suggests he withheld critical exculpatory findings that undermined the legal basis for continued monitoring.
The document unearthed by Grassley is an FBI FD-302 report from December 2020, which records a member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team stating that, after months of investigation, it had become obvious that Phares had been truthful and that there was no case against him. It is not known who the whistleblower within the Mueller team is, nor how Grassley obtained the document.
In the words of the whistleblower, “there were no corroborating facts that tied [Phares] to certain facts that we thought were originally true … there was nothing confirming [Phares] received a large money payment, and nothing confirming [Phares] had a meeting in another country for the purposes of the initial allegation.”
Despite this, Clinesmith is described as having prevented these conclusions from being sent to the DOJ officials responsible for presenting the FISA renewal applications, telling colleagues directly, “We can’t send this to DOJ.” According to the report, Clinesmith then “set up a meeting with DOJ and led a discussion on the FISA renewal.”
This account closely tracks what was already established in the Carter Page case. There, Clinesmith altered an email to indicate that Page was not a CIA source when he had, in fact, previously provided information to the agency. That falsification was used in a FISA renewal application and formed the basis of the single criminal charge brought against him by Special Counsel John Durham.
The one-year probation sentence Clinesmith received was widely regarded as disproportionately lenient given both the seriousness of the conduct and the central importance of candor in a process that operates without any adversarial check on the government’s representations. Clinesmith was quickly reinstated in good standing with the D.C. Bar, even as that same organization is actively seeking to disbar former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark for doing his job — drafting a memo on potential irregularities in the 2020 election. The contrast in standards is striking and underscores just how skewed accountability has been.
Even before the latest disclosures, it was clear that the single charge captured only a fraction of Clinesmith’s misconduct. In the Page FISA applications, Clinesmith had portrayed Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko as being based in Russia, implying direct access to Kremlin secrets. In reality, Danchenko was based in Washington, D.C. An analysis of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation suggests Clinesmith not only knew this but had been explicitly warned by colleagues not to describe Danchenko as Russia-based, and did it anyway.
That false representation created the illusion of access that Clinesmith evidently knew did not exist and directly shaped the court’s perception of the Steele dossier’s credibility. It appears to have been a knowing misrepresentation of a basic fact designed to prop up a failing case.
Despite the centrality of that deception, it was never charged.
The Grassley material adds another layer, indicating that Clinesmith employed the same deceptive tactics in the Phares investigation. The structural vulnerability in both cases is identical. FISA applications are one-sided: the court sees only what the FBI and DOJ choose to present, with no opposing counsel and no independent verification. That asymmetry places an extraordinary duty of candor on the government. When information is withheld or falsified, the court is not merely misled on a technicality; it is stripped of the only mechanism guarding against abuse of the government’s surveillance powers.
The implications are enormous. We now know that FISA was used against at least two Trump advisers, with a minimum of eight warrant applications spanning two years.
The record makes clear that Clinesmith’s role was neither peripheral nor isolated. His involvement across multiple FISA matters, combined with the allegation that he concealed material information not just from the court but even from colleagues within the government, demonstrates conduct that was sustained and deliberate, far beyond a single lapse in judgment as the public narrative has suggested. He was a central operator exploiting the system at its most vulnerable point, repeatedly misleading the court and hiding the truth from within the government itself.
The obvious question is why Durham treated this as a narrow, isolated offense. If Clinesmith’s role in the Phares case was deliberately concealed from Durham and his team, it raises serious questions about who was doing the hiding and what else may have been suppressed. There could also be legal consequences, particularly if those actions fall within the five-year statute of limitations for additional charges, which they likely do given that Durham’s investigation ran through May 2023.
What is beyond dispute is this: Clinesmith engaged in a sustained pattern of misconduct across multiple investigations, knowingly falsifying and withholding information to justify surveillance of innocent American citizens.
A single charge and a minimal penalty do not come close to reflecting that reality. This was a systematic abuse of one of the most powerful and least scrutinized tools in the federal government’s arsenal, and the reckoning for it has, so far, largely failed to arrive.
