Mueller lawyer with anti-Trump bias is ex-FBI official facing FISA criminal investigation

The FBI lawyer who is under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related to the surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser expressed negative opinions of President Trump in messages to colleagues.

Kevin Clinesmith, who once was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, has been identified as the attorney who could face a criminal charge as part of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s expansive criminal inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation, according to the New York Times.

As part of the Justice Department watchdog’s now-completed investigation into alleged surveillance abuses, Clinesmith was found to have altered an email that was used by officials as they prepared an application renewal to present before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to electronically surveil Carter Page, a onetime foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.

Clinesmith was an attorney with the FBI’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch and worked under FBI General Counsel James Baker and Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson. He had worked on the Clinton email investigation as well as the Trump-Russia probe. Clinesmith was present in the FBI’s meeting with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in February 2017 in Chicago, Papadopoulos told lawmakers in 2018. An Australian diplomat’s tip about Papadopoulos claiming the Russians had damaging information about Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, effectively prompted the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, called Crossfire Hurricane, in July 2016.

Horowitz’s investigators found Clinesmith falsely asserted he had documentation to back up a claim while in talks with the Justice Department about the factual basis for a FISA warrant application renewal. He then took an email from an official from another agency that contained multiple factual assertions, added material of his own, and gave it to a fellow FBI official who was preparing an affidavit for the Page case.