When Kevin Met Jimmy

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, Frontpage pick for worst judge in America, is a member of the DC District Court. The presiding judge of that circuit is James E. Boasberg, appointed in 2010 by the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Boasberg to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and from January 2020 to May 2021 Boasberg was the FISA court’s presiding judge. At the time, as NPR explains, “the FBI faced harsh criticism for submitting inaccurate applications to the court.”

One of the “inaccurate” applications came from Kevin Clinesmith, Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. In August of 2020, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to altering an email to show that U.S. Navy veteran Carter Page was not a CIA asset, when in fact he was. That falsehood exposed Page, an American citizen who worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, to surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As Politico explains, Boasberg handled the sentencing “as part of his more routine duties as a federal district court judge in Washington.” Unlike the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the FISA court boss can slide down to his home circuit and rule on matters he handled with FISA. The people have cause to wonder about his ruling on the FBI’s Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch.

Clinesmith claimed he thought his statement about Page was true at the time, and Boasberg agreed. “By altering the email,” the judge explained, “he was saving himself some work and taking an inappropriate shortcut.” Boasberg also agreed with a DOJ Inspector General statement that political considerations played no role in Clinesmith’s actions. According to Boasberg, “it is not at all clear to me the FISA warrant would not have been signed but for this error,” a variant of the “inaccurate” description for a deliberate falsification.

Boasberg said that Clinesmith’s “misstatement” was the “only stain on the defendant’s character that I have been able to discern.” Trouble was, since Clinesmith had already pleaded guilty, he was no longer a “defendant” but an admitted criminal awaiting sentence. The maximum sentence on the felony offense is five years in prison plus a fine of $250,000. Judge Boasberg gave Clinesmith 12 months probation and 400 hours community service. What the FBI forger is doing now is uncertain but Boasberg has become a celebrity to the establishment media. As NPR explains:

Almost from the start of his tenure this year as chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., weighty legal issues arrived on the desk of James “Jeb” Boasberg.

Boasberg, 60, presides over a building where trials of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are underway, as are grand jury investigations of former President Donald Trump. In one of his first official acts, Chief Judge Boasberg issued what could become a landmark ruling that directs former Vice President Mike Pence to testify about his contacts with Trump in the days before the insurrection.

And so on. Several stories tout Boasberg’s history degree from Oxford and his JD from Yale. Whatever his reputation and self-image, the Obama judge is a partisan Trump inquisitor, a pro-bono attorney for government criminals, and a strong argument for elimination of the FISA court.

“The FISA court is a judicial body with no parallel in American history. A group of judges operating in complete secret and issuing binding rulings based solely on the government’s arguments,” explained Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, in 2013. In the same proceeding, Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal said the FISA court “exercises vast invisible power.” What could possibly go wrong?