The District of Columbia Bar quietly changed the indefinite suspension of disgraced FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s law license to a one-year suspension, despite his significant role in helping perpetrate the Russia-collusion hoax, according to American Greatness.
Clinesmith has been, to date, the only person indicted by Special Counsel John Durham‘s probe into the conspiratorial role that the intelligence community played in the anti-Trump smear campaign.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August 2020 after an inspector-general’s report revealed he had doctored an email that was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2017.
The email claimed that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was not a CIA informant, even though Page had been a CIA “operation contact” for five years.
Clinesmith denied that his altering of the exculpatory evidence was deceptive and claimed that he believed he was telling the truth.
“At the time I believed the information I was providing in the email was accurate, but I am agreeing that the information I inserted into the email was not already there,” Clinesmith told the court.
However, bar enforcers decided Clinesmith’s “misconduct has been used to discredit what appeared otherwise to have been a legitimate and highly important investigation” of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, and suspended his law license indefinitely.
That decision was retroactively reversed this week, although the D.C. Bar did not offer an explanation as to why. Now, Clinesmith has to wait only a year before practicing law again.
Meanwhile, Democratic officials have waged a campaign to disbar several Trump allies, including Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell.
Giuliani was suspended from practicing law in New York in June because he helped Trump file several lawsuits contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“We do not live in a free state,” Giuliani said at the time.
“We live in a state that’s controlled by the Democrat Party: Cuomo, de Blasio and the Democrats,” he continued. “We have a double standard. There’s no doubt if I was representing Hillary Clinton, I’d be their hero.”
