Kevin Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying a 2017 CIA e-mail related to the bogus Russian collusion investigation launched by the FBI against Donald Trump and some of his aides.
Clinesmith's criminal deception deprived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of accurate information critical to its determination of whether to renew its electronic surveillance authorization against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
In his capacity as a federal district court judge, Boasberg handed Clinesmith a get out of jail free card.
Clinesmith did not simply edit the CIA e-mail to fix its grammar or correct a typo, an act that itself would have been improper.
Despite being informed by a CIA liaison that Carter Page had a prior relationship with the CIA as a source of information, Clinesmith altered the 2017 e-mail from the CIA to say precisely the opposite.
Clinesmith did so with full awareness of how critical an accurate description of Page's relationship with the CIA would be to the FISA Court in ruling on a government application to continue spying on Page.
Clinesmith had gone from being a faceless government lawyer to "Standing in the eye of a media hurricane." Thus, Judge Boasberg concluded, after weighing "The damages he caused and what he has suffered and the positives in his own life - I believe a probationary sentence is appropriate here and will therefore impose it."
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/ex-fbi-lawyer-gets-no-jail-time-falsifying-joseph-klein/
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