The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.
The much-anticipated report due out Dec. 9 from Inspector General Michael Horowitz will allege that a low-level FBI lawyer inappropriately altered a document that was used during the process to renew a controversial warrant for electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, the officials said. The inspector general referred that finding to U.S. Attorney John Durham, and the lawyer involved is being investigated criminally for possibly making a false statement, they said.
But Horowitz will conclude that the application still had a proper legal and factual basis, and, more broadly, that FBI officials did not act improperly in opening the Russia investigation, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive report.
The report generally rebuts accusations of a political conspiracy among senior law enforcement officials against the Trump campaign to favor Democrat Hillary Clinton while also knocking the bureau for procedural shortcomings in the FBI, the officials said. On balance, they said, it provides a mixed assessment of the FBI and Justice Department’s undertaking of a probe that became highly politicized and divided the nation.
“You can see how the warring factions will seize on the various parts of this to advance their respective narratives,” said a person familiar with the inspector general’s investigation.
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That report, though, was focused on the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and the inspector general also found “no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias.”
The inspector general is not expected to level accusations of bias against top-level FBI officials in the forthcoming report, people familiar with the matter said.
Instead, the most damaging findings seem directed at lower-level FBI employees, especially a lawyer who was part of the process to renew a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
As a part of the process to renew one of the later warrants, an FBI agent asked FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith whether Clinesmith could document a certain claim, people familiar with the matter said. Clinesmith, the people said, asserted that he could with an email from someone at another agency.
Before providing that email to the FBI agent, though, Clinesmith added text to it, the people familiar with the matter said. They said it was a serious error in judgment, though Horowitz’s report is not expected to allege that Clinesmith’s action was motivated by political animus. Clinesmith had previously provided a genuine copy of the email, without his addition, to a Justice Department lawyer, a person familiar with the matter said.
Clinesmith’s name was first reported by the New York Times. He did not respond messages seeking comment.
Horowitz also is expected to criticize an agent — though not the one who sought the documentation from Clinesmith — for carelessness, people familiar with the matter said. The reasons for that conclusion were not immediately clear.
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Justice Department and FBI officials have long defended their decision to initiate the investigation. Rosenstein said in remarks that he posted online this year that “Based on what I knew in May 2017, the investigation of Russian election interference was justified.”
The investigation regarding the 2016 campaign “fundamentally was not about Donald Trump but was about Russia — full stop,” former FBI general counsel James A. Baker said at a Brookings Institution event in May. “It was always about Russia. It was about what Russia was, and is, doing and planning. ”
The inspector general also is expected to find that the application and subsequent renewals to monitor Page’s communications were proper and observed relevant guidelines, the officials said.
