The Democrats nefarious use of Carter Page to spy on the President

NY Post:

Not until lurid headlines damned Carter Page as a traitor to his country in September 2016, six weeks before the presidential election, did he realize someone was using him to play a dirty political trick.

Reporters had been hounding the energy investor with strangely detailed questions about his ties to Russia. Page told each of them that he was a former US Navy lieutenant, a graduate of Annapolis, an Eagle Scout — hardly a likely protagonist in some cloak-and-dagger drama.

But he had also served as a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump. And secretly, within a collection of Democratic opposition-research memos soon to be known as the Steele Dossier, Page had been cast as the GOP candidate’s liaison to Vladimir Putin.

It was the launch of the collusion tale that nearly destroyed a presidency. And the little-known Page, now 49, had an unsought starring role.

Page told reporters the truth that fall — but it wasn’t the whole truth, he writes in “Abuse and Power: How an Innocent American Was Framed in an Attempted Coup Against the President” (Regnery), out Tuesday.

In fact, as he repeatedly informed FBI investigators all the way up to Director James Comey himself, Page was a longtime CIA informant, not only on Russian affairs but on China and the Middle East.

His status as a trusted US intelligence source extended beyond the CIA. Only months before, Page had helped the FBI itself make a case against an accused Russian spook.

That should have been enough to clear Page’s name. Instead, the FBI painted a target on his back.

This month, federal charges were filed against Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer involved in all three of the political investigations centered on the 2016 election: the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe, the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry into Trump’s campaign, and the Special Counsel office of Robert Mueller.

Attorney General Bill Barr has assigned US Attorney John Durham to get to the bottom of Crossfire Hurricane — and the case against Clinesmith could mean that answers are near.

In October 2016, the FBI obtained a Title I warrant against Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that set up a secret court to hear dangerous terrorism and national security cases.

A Title I warrant, the most intrusive type, gives investigators access to all of a target’s communications — along with those of the target’s contacts, and all of the contacts’ contacts.

That “two-hop” coverage opened not only Page’s electronic records to investigators, but Trump’s as well, while he was a candidate and throughout his first eight months in the White House. Not exactly “wires tapped in Trump Tower,” as the president alleged in an explosive March 2017 tweetstorm, but the digital-age equivalent.

And as Durham’s court filing showed, Clinesmith and his colleagues knew all along that Page was never a Russian spy.

In August 2016, documents show, the CIA told the Crossfire Hurricane team that Page had been a trusted informant for years. That explained all of the Russian contacts the FBI saw as suspicious — two months before agents filed the first warrant against Page.

The FBI illegally withheld that exculpatory evidence from the FISA court.

Later, in June 2017, Clinesmith — by then a member of Mueller’s staff — made the offense overt by altering a CIA document that confirmed Page’s status with the agency, Durham told the court. Clinesmith took a guilty plea on Aug. 19.

The US government snooped on Page for 11 months. He was never charged with any crime. But, he says, the death threats and the public hounding never ended. His life and business were ruined.

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There is much more.  This is the intro to Page's book about how the FBI used him to spy on Trump and his campaign.  While Clinesmith pled guilty to changing a document in order to continue FI warrants against Page, Mueller, and the FBI knew all along that Page was a trusted CIA asset.  Clinesmith was not the only one involved in lying to the FBI court.

When Trump says Obama and Biden spied on him, he is not wrong.  This explains how they did it.