‘I had no idea’: FBI misled court to spy on 2nd Trump campaign adviser

Carter Page wasn’t the only adviser from Trump’s first campaign wiretapped by the FBI. Walid Phares was electronically monitored for a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington-based FBI agent who was assigned to investigate him as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion probe.

As in Page’s case, the bureau withheld evidence exonerating Phares from the court to secure surveillance authorization, according to newly declassified FBI documents.

“I had no idea any of this was happening,” Phares told RealClearInvestigations in an exclusive interview Wednesday night. “This is shocking because they told my lawyer that I was only a ‘witness’ and that they just needed some information.”

“But these were huge abuses that I can see now,” he added. Phares said he intends to sue the FBI and Justice Department for damages.

The 68-year-old Lebanese-American scholar said case agents and prosecutors grilled him for months, questioned his employer, and even went after his bank records. As a result, he said he lost his job at a university, his livelihood, and even his bank accounts and credit card after Wells Fargo cancelled them.

“It was like a disaster for me financially and physically,” he said. “I also lost my Fox News contract” as an expert on terrorism and the Middle East, which he had held since 2007.

Phares was not hired by the Trump administration, even though he had been expected to land a high-level foreign policy position. “They scared the agencies from me so I would have problems with (obtaining) a security clearance,” he said.

‘No Corroborating Facts’

Investigators could find “nothing” criminal on Phares during their probe, according to the lead case agent, and in fact, they concluded he was “honest.” Yet Mueller’s team continued to secretly spy on Phares – without providing the powerful federal spy court any of the exculpatory evidence that could clear Phares as required by law.

The agent told investigators in a separate 2020 internal FBI review that “there were no corroborating facts that tied Crosswind [the codename for Phares’ case] to certain facts that we thought were originally true,” according to a transcript of his testimony, released after more than five years of concealment.

He added that “nothing” collected from Phares’ communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, including phone messages and emails, “aided the investigation other than to prove the target was being honest with investigators,” who had interviewed him repeatedly.

Nonetheless, the FBI continued monitoring Phares as part of a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigation. He was never charged with any violations of the act.

“There was a ‘let’s get him’ attitude among prosecutors on Mueller’s team,” the agent said, according to the new documents, noting that several prosecutors shared an anti-Trump bias and even tacked up negative cartoons of the president on the walls of their office.

The FBI agent, whose name is redacted in several pages of declassified FBI documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, added that “there was nothing confirming Crosswind [Phares] received a large money payment, and nothing confirming Crosswind had a meeting in another country for the purposes of the initial allegation.”

Misleading the Court

When Mueller’s team applied for the fourth and final warrant to secretly surveil Phares in 2018, the agent argued that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court  [FISC] needed to be alerted to how new information “had changed our understanding of our initial analysis” that Phares was a foreign agent. He suggested several corrections, but was rebuffed by an FBI lawyer.

“I pointed out these specific corrections to the application in numerous instances throughout the FISA process,” the agent said. “I sent these edits to Kevin Clinesmith who said, ‘We can’t send this to DOJ.’”

A senior FBI attorney, Clinesmith had also been assigned to Mueller’s team, which agreed the corrections were unnecessary.

It wouldn’t be the first time Clinesmith, whose internal texts and emails show he had an intense anti-Trump bias, withheld exculpatory evidence from the FISA court.

Clinesmith later pleaded guilty to altering evidence used in an application to renew a FISA warrant to spy on another Trump adviser, Page, whom the FBI falsely accused of acting as a Russian agent. To secure the renewal, Clinesmith changed the wording in an intelligence email that exonerated Page, reversing its meaning.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the FBI based its warrants targeting Page largely on a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier of false opposition research. The IG concluded the FBI abused its FISA authority while spying on Page, including failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the surveillance court. Far from aiding Moscow, the former Naval officer had previously worked with the CIA and FBI to help catch Russian spies, as RCI first reported.

The FISA court subsequently invalidated some of the warrants against Page, who was never charged with a crime and is now suing the FBI and DOJ for $75 million for violating his constitutional rights against improper searches and seizures.

His case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, but the DOJ’s solicitor general has repeatedly delayed filing a response to his petition, claiming he has other “pressing” matters. The high bench has set the next filing deadline for April 22.

The year-long FISA eavesdropping on Phares appears to be missing from both Horowitz’s and Special Counsel John Durham’s reports investigating FBI abuses in the Russiagate scandal, raising fresh questions about the thoroughness of those investigations. It is still not clear if the three other Trump campaign officials subject to Russiagate investigations – Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos – were also wiretapped.

 

A $10 Million Bribe?

In an RCI interview, Phares said the false allegations against him originated with the CIA, which issued a report in 2016 alleging he had taken a $10 million bribe from the Egyptian government intended for the Trump campaign during a meeting in Cairo.

John Brennan, an Obama appointee, was the director of the CIA at the time. He is currently under federal grand jury investigation for his role in the Russiagate hoax.

DOJ is building a “grand conspiracy” case against former Obama and Biden officials for allegedly committing political espionage against Trump and his advisers by manufacturing criminal investigations and depriving them of their rights under color of law. It’s not immediately known if the investigation includes the Phares case. The FBI and DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

Although the Mueller investigation’s primary mandate was to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, it veered into additional investigative areas, including probing campaign contacts with other foreign governments.

Phares had taken trips to Cairo during the 2016 campaign while advising Trump on the Middle East.

The investigating agent said the highly classified intelligence agency reports that Phares secretly worked with the Egyptian government to influence the incoming administration “were disproven.”

“Despite this, the [Mueller] team still went on with the third renewal of the FISA [against Phares],” he said.

The investigation was closed in 2019, and Phares was never charged with a crime. Mueller’s $30 million-plus investigation ultimately found no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia or any foreign government.

Misconduct and Bias

Grassley said the FBI agent’s testimony “details substantial allegations of misconduct and political bias occurring within Special Counsel Mueller’s office during the investigation,” including “misleading the FISC,” or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The Republican senator has requested DOJ provide his committee “all FISA applications, predication material and related reporting” from the Crosswind probe to understand the full extent to which the FISA court was misled.

The identity of the FISA judges who approved the top-secret warrants is not yet known. But the presiding FISC judge at the time was Rosemary Collyer, a George W. Bush appointee who personally signed off on the wiretapping of Carter Page. Before resigning in 2020, Collyer issued an order stating that the FBI in its sworn affidavits had “provided false information and withheld material information detrimental to the FBI’s case [against Page].”

RCI first reported that Phares was the subject of a FARA investigation approved by former Obama DOJ official David Laufman, along with four other Trump campaign officials. But the revelation he was also put under FISA surveillance – the government’s most powerful investigative tool – had not been known until Grassley’s disclosures earlier this week.

Phares said he suspected he might be under some kind of surveillance but didn’t know for certain until this week’s release of the declassified FBI documents. He said he recently received notices from Hotmail and Yahoo that the DOJ had sought records from his email accounts through an unspecified legal process.

“They were fishing,” he told RCI.

Although agents working with Mueller initially asked Phares about Russia, they soon zeroed in on his dealings with Egypt. Mueller’s prosecutors later told him he was merely a witness, not a target.

Phares said he was first interviewed in September 2017 by Washington-based FBI agents working for Mueller.

“Two agents showed up at my door flashing badges and asked if we could speak,” he recalled. “I welcomed them in because I was a lead lecturer at the FBI (on counterterrorism), but they took four hours questioning me, and it made my wife very uncomfortable.”

Added Phares: “I made a huge mistake not lawyering up earlier.”

‘Rougher and Tougher’

He said their questions got “rougher and tougher” over the next few months of interviews, which he said later included Mueller prosecutor Zainab Ahmad, who was originally hired at Main Justice in the Spring of 2016 by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Ahmad was one of the key Mueller team members responsible for handling the controversial perjury case against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, which was later thrown out. Like Flynn, Phares was an outspoken critic of Islamic terrorism, Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal, and the influence of the radical, pro-jihad Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and America.

He said he believes the Obama administration – including Brennan’s CIA – was also monitoring him during the 2016 campaign.

Declassified briefing notes from a meeting shortly after Trump took office between former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Obama-appointed officials with DOJ’s national security division indicate that the FBI and DOJ were “working on a FISA application” targeting “Walid Phares” as early as March 2017.

“They knew they had nothing on Russia, so they went after me on Egypt. But the main target was President Trump,” Phares said. “They had to neutralize him and any of his associates who could carry out his agenda.”

Civil-rights watchdogs have called the egregious spying violations against Carter Page the worst abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act since it was enacted more than 45 years ago. Now another U.S. citizen may have been subjected to even worse abuses.