In all the tens of millions of words that have been written by the mainstream media about the Trump-Russia collusion story, in all the hundreds of names that have appeared within those often-breathless filings, one name almost never appears: Kevin Clinesmith.
No, Clinesmith doesn’t appear in any of the four books — Fear, Rage, Peril, and War — written by the so-called Dean of Investigative Journalism, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. Nor does Clinesmith appear in The Divider, the ostensibly serious 725-page book about the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term by former New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker and his wife, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.
I have a theory as to why this might be: because the mainstream media can’t account for what Clinesmith did.
Clinesmith, a well-placed Trump-hating FBI lawyer, pleaded guilty in 2020 to having falsified evidence on an application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. What, exactly, did Clinesmith do? He doctored an email saying that Page had been a CIA source to indicate just the opposite — that Page had not been a CIA source.
That warrant was ultimately approved by a FISA court judge, and it allowed the Obama administration to spy not just on Carter Page but on candidate Donald Trump and his entire team during the 2016 campaign. And its three successive renewals allowed the FBI to continue spying on Trump during his presidency.
So when you ponder the term “abuse of power,” don’t think about Watergate and Richard Nixon. Instead, think about Crossfire Hurricane and Barack Obama.
If ever there was a criminal sentence that showed Washington to be a rigged town, it was Clinesmith’s sentence, which was handed down by Judge James Boasberg — yes, that James Boasberg: 12 months of probation and 400 hours of community service. That’s right — not so much as a minute behind bars for helping Obama and his coconspirators spy on Trump.
John Durham should’ve put the screws to Clinesmith. He should’ve made this mid-level FBI cutout sing like a canary, thereby unraveling the whole Crossfire Hurricane hoax. Instead, he got just a wrist-slap for his treachery. “Mr. Clinesmith,” said Boasberg at sentencing, “has lost his job in government service — what has given his life much meaning.”
Clinesmith might’ve gotten a wrist-slap for his treachery back then, but he might not be out of the woods just yet. Yesterday, as Hans Mahncke at The Federalist reports, new information has come out that Clinesmith’s criminality regarding Carter Page may have been “part of a broader, systematic pattern of abuse that extended to another [FISA] investigation against Trump adviser Walid Phares.” Mahncke continues:
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.
Yeah, yeah, you say. *That’s all well and good, but hasn’t the statute of limitations long since run out on that?
It’s a great question. But remember that “Grand Conspiracy” investigation I mentioned back in July — the one that the Trump Department of Justice was conducting?
As Just the News’s John Solomon reported at the time, a Grand Conspiracy investigation “would allow a special prosecutor time to tie alleged criminal events currently covered by statutes of limitations to older events by treating them as part of an ongoing conspiracy or even a racketeering operation.”
So just because Clinesmith and Obama and Clinton and Brennan and Comey and Strzok were conspiring way back in 2015 doesn’t mean it’s now off-limits.
And as for the unlikelihood of securing any convictions in the Rigged Town of Washington, Solomon addressed that, too: “The ‘grand conspiracy’ probe also would open the door to empanel a grand jury outside of Washington, D.C., where juries have been reluctant to convict actors who pursued Trump.”
So there’s hope yet — hope that an out-of-control deep state can finally be held accountable.
Why, though, is all this stuff about some obscure FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith important, a full decade after the fact of his crime?
Because Clinesmith is the key to unraveling a colossal conspiracy — a conspiracy that served as the opening salvo of the Democrats’ ongoing deep-state war on Donald Trump.
And, finally, because Clinesmith reminds us that justice still hasn’t been served. Not even close.
