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Documents Show Senior Kerry Aide Used Private Email to Send Steele Reports to State Department Colleagues
epoch times ^ | 1/8/2020 | mark tapscott

Posted on 01/08/2020 10:34:25 PM PST by bitt

WASHINGTON—Eleven pages of State Department documents released on Jan. 7 in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch show that Jonathan Winer, an assistant to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, used his private email address to convey information he received from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to top U.S. diplomatic officials.

“I will send them to her [his assistant, Nina Miller] from my non-State email account, not copying myself,” Winer said in response to a December 2014 email from Paul Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary for European Affairs.

Jones wanted Winer to use the State Department’s secure email system, known informally as the “high side,” to transmit reports from Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.

“Given our ongoing concerns about security of open net, [then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland] and I wonder if it would be possible for you to flip Orbis reports to this system before sending them to us. Understand that’s yet another step in the process for you. We just want to be sure we don’t inadvertently undermine a very good source of info or worse.”

Winer, who was then-special coordinator for Libya under Kerry, continued in his response, telling Jones “she will then send them to us. You know who they are coming from, so even high side from here I will just refer to them as ‘O Reports,’ and strip out any other identifying information as to sourcing.”

(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Government; Politics/Elections; US: Massachusetts; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: 201412; 201609; bobbaer; brexit; brexitparty; chrissteele; christophersteele; cia; danchenko; fusiongps; highside; hightide; igordanchenko; iran; johnkerry; jonathanwiner; judicialwatch; kerry; libya; lurch; massachusetts; mi6; nigelfarage; ninamiller; orbis; orbisreports; oreports; pauljones; robertbaer; steele; unitedkingdom; victorianuland

1 posted on 01/08/2020 10:34:25 PM PST by bitt
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To: Whenifhow; null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; azishot; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; ..

p


2 posted on 01/08/2020 10:34:57 PM PST by bitt (A FRIVOLOUS impeachment vote is a SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY)
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To: bitt

Does this mean Kerry and McCain were working this together?


3 posted on 01/08/2020 10:39:16 PM PST by ryderann
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To: bitt

What a Surprise! Not!! Just search the name Richard Windsor, and then all the hidden private,alternate email addresses democRATs have been using for decades to avoid FOIA requests. Rules, regulations, laws and morals are for chumps.


4 posted on 01/08/2020 10:43:23 PM PST by Ronaldus Magnus III (Do, or do not, there is no try.)
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To: bitt

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/09/09/clinton-libya_and_trump-russia_a_tale_of_two_probes_and_the_fbi_120083.html

—SNIP-— the FBI’s subdued handling of the matter appears to contrast with its all-hands-on-deck response to another set of unconfirmed memos that it also received in mid-2016 – the Steele dossier – and the fact that Clinton crony Sid Blumenthal and Shearer were deeply involved in the effort to tie Trump to Russia.-——snip-——

The Second ‘Dossier’

One of the people they used to pass on these false allegations to the FBI was Jonathan Winer, then a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya.

Winer declined to comment for this article, but in a Washington Post op-ed in February of last year, he explained his meeting with his “old friend” Blumenthal. When the two met in September 2016, Winer had already met with Steele and was familiar with the contents of Steele’s dossier on Trump.

“What struck me was how some of [Shearer’s] material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve After the Blumenthal meeting, Winer passed Shearer’s material on to Steele.

“[Steele] told me it was potentially ‘collateral’ information. I asked him what that meant. He said that it was similar but separate from the information he had gathered from his sources. I agreed to let him keep a copy of the Shearer notes,” Winer recounts.

He further states: “I did not mention or share his notes with anyone at the State Department. I did not expect them to be shared with anyone in the U.S. government. But I learned later that Steele did share them — with the FBI, after the FBI asked him to provide everything he had on allegations relating to Trump, his campaign and Russian interference in U.S. elections.”


5 posted on 01/08/2020 10:54:12 PM PST by Liz (Our side has 8 trillion bullets; the other side doesn't know which bathroom to use.)
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To: bitt

The Weird Tales of Jonathan Winer
by Eric Felten February 10, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-weird-tales-of-jonathan-winer

Friday’s Washington Post featured an op-ed by an old Washington hand, late of the State Department, who was right in the middle of the dossier affair, a Mr. Jonathan M. Winer. His byline bio identifies him as “a Washington lawyer and consultant,” and “a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of State for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya.” In the print edition of the paper, the op-ed is headlined with the straightforward “My role in the Trump dossier.” Online, Winer’s story got a somewhat more self-pitying, self-aggrandizing treatment: “Devin Nunes is investigating me. Here’s the truth.”

Whatever the headline, as an effort at self-justification Winer’s effort is an epic fail. Rather than putting to rest questions about the origin and dissemination of the Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, Winer’s account leaves the reader slack-jawed at the remarkable coincidences he cites and the astonishing characters who just happen to turn up in his narrative.

As Winer tells it, he and Steele were old pals. They “met and became friends” in 2009, when both were in the business of selling “business intelligence,” much of it involving Russia. Winer went back to work at State in 2013, after his old Capitol Hill boss, John Kerry, had become secretary of State. But he didn’t lose track of his friend Steele—not at all. He shared, and shared, and shared Steele’s corporate intelligence work with the State Department’s Russia desk. “Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.” (Let’s not speculate about how much it may have been worth to Steele to be able to tell his clients that the materials they were paying for were being regularly consumed by policy-makers in Foggy Bottom.)

Come the summer of 2016, Steele’s prime client was the campaign of Hillary Clinton, by way of the hired-guns at Fusion GPS, for whom he was assembling a grab bag of Trump tales from some sort of Russian sources. Come the fall Steele was spreading dossier info to various news organizations, the FBI, and the State Department. “In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.’” Here’s where it starts getting particularly weird: “I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” Winer writes. “I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with [Winer’s boss at State, Victoria] Nuland.” I doubt I’m the only one who finds this bit of peekaboo passing strange.

To hear Winer tell it, when he gave her his memo, Nuland was all for the State Department doing something about it: She “indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of State needed to be made aware of this material.” Maybe. But to hear Nuland tell it, she recognized the dossier for what it was: “What I did was say that this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of—not the business of the State Department,” Nuland said in an interview with Politico, “and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act, which requires that you stay out of politics. So, my advice to those who were interfacing with [Steele] was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate whether they thought it was credible.”

But according to his piece in the Post, Winer had other people to share the Steele info with, too: “In late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal.” Given Blumenthal’s well-earned reputation as a Clinton hatchet-man, the words “old friend, Sidney Blumenthal” should be telling, if not alarming. So what was the nub of the conversation between these two old friends who just happen to have gotten together in the thick of a presidential campaign? Perhaps they were talking Libya—Blumenthal had been trying for some time to get federal contracts for work in Libya, and Winer was the special envoy to the war-wracked country. But no, they ended up talking about the dossier. You see, it just sort of came up naturally: Blumenthal’s emails had been hacked a few years before, and so “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s report.” You’d think that Sid would have been gob-smacked, astonished at the information sleuthing spook Steele had unearthed. Instead, and ever so matter-of-factly, Blumenthal pulled out a dossier of his own: “He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.”

That’s right, Blumenthal had a dossier of his own, compiled by a Clinton crony of decades’ standing, Cody Shearer, and right at the ready. What are the odds?

If this extra dossier is as contrived as it sounds, it wouldn’t be the first time that Shearer peddled fabulous information against a Republican presidential ticket in the waning days of a Clinton campaign. In 1992 Shearer championed the phony story that a poor fellow named Brett Kimberlin was rotting in an Indiana jail, being kept incommunicado so that he couldn’t tell the world about how Vice President Dan Quayle bought marijuana from him back in the 1970s. Yes, Kimberlin was a drug smuggler, and yes, he was indeed in jail—for a string of terroristic bombings in Indianapolis. Shearer was willing to promote the fantastical tales of the “Speedway Bomber” if that helped his friends the Clintons.


6 posted on 01/08/2020 11:00:10 PM PST by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: tired&retired

OCTOBER 31, 2019
|
JUDICIAL WATCH
Judicial Watch: Documents Reveal Obama State Department Official in Contact with Russian Embassy ‘Political Chief’ One Month Before Trump Inauguration

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-documents-reveal-obama-state-department-official-in-contact-with-russian-embassy-political-chief-one-month-before-trump-inauguration/

Judicial Watch and The Daily Caller News Foundation today released eight pages of State Department documents revealing that on December 23, 2016, 28 days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, State Department Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer had a 10-minute phone call with Alexey Vladimirovich Skosyrev, the “political chief” at the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC.

The documents also show that State Department officials continued to use unsecure BlackBerry devices for the transmission of classified material more than a year after Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system had been revealed.

Following Winer’s December 23 call with Russian political operative Skosyrev, State Department official Anne Sackville-West provides a “read-out” of the call to department colleagues in which she updates the “S-Lavrov points” (Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov). The body of the read-out is entirely redacted as classified for reasons of national security or foreign policy. Despite the classification, Eric Green, then-director of the Office of Russian Affairs in the Eurasian Bureau of the State Department, forwarded the exchange via his unsecure BlackBerry to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs Kathleen Kavalec, to Obama Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Ambassador Victoria Nuland, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary John Heffern. Kavalec then responds, saying “Jonathan called me after first trying to get through to Toria and John. He relayed this readout, noting that Skosyrev emphasized that [redacted].”

“The State Department has still not fully explained its role in collecting and disseminating Christopher Steele’s false allegations about President Trump’s ties to Russia,” said Daily Caller News Foundation President Neil Patel. “The latest documents obtained by Judicial Watch on behalf of The Daily Caller News Foundation raise new and important questions about the role played by Jonathan Winer, who played a key role as Steele’s conduit to U.S. diplomats.”

“The Kerry State Department and Jonathan Winer worked hand-in-glove with the Clinton Fusion GPS spy Christopher Steele. It is suspicious, to say the least, that Winer was in contact with a senior Russian government official as the Kerry State Department was simultaneously pushing the Russia smear against then President-elect Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Judicial Watch uncovered State Departments documents showing that Winer played a key role in facilitating Steele’s access to other top government officials, prominent international business executives. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump. In September 2019, Judicial Watch released State Department documents revealing that former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May of 2014 with Winer and Nuland.

In July 2019, Judicial Watch uncovered a series of documents from the State Department that include a September 2016 email exchange between Nuland and Winer, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”

In December 2018, Judicial Watch released documents revealing that Nuland was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Trump taking office.

In May 2019, Judicial Watch’s released documents showing a conversation between Kavalec and Bruce Ohr, discussing the targeting of Donald Trump with Steele dossier material. In discussing a meeting with the potential source for a Mother Jones article accusing the Trump campaign of taking money from a Russian-American oil magnate, as well as Christopher Steele’s connection to that source, Kavalec emails Ohr citing the accusatory Mother Jones article. Ohr says, “I really hope we can get something going here.”


7 posted on 01/08/2020 11:08:12 PM PST by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: bitt; piasa; MadMax, the Grinning Reaper
Per Winer's February 8, 2018 Washington Post article, linked in the source from the original post, Winer first met Steele in 2009 while working as a consultant on Russian matters, and after returning to the State Department to work for John Kerry again in 2013, he began forwarding Steele's reports on Russia to Victoria Nuland and other members of the State Department on an ongoing basis. This preceded Steele contacting Winer in summer 2016 to discuss the Trump dossier, a summary of which he shared with Nuland in September 2016 for sharing with John Kerry. Then in late September, he spoke to Sidney Blumenthal about the same material, and Blumenthal showed him notes from Cody Shearer.
8 posted on 01/08/2020 11:13:22 PM PST by Fedora
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To: bitt

The January 7, 2020 Judicial Watch article on which the epic times article is based is really good.

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-state-department-handler-for-steele-used-personal-email-to-push-reports/


9 posted on 01/08/2020 11:14:35 PM PST by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: piasa
This article goes into more detail on the Shearer/Blumenthal dossier, which was based partly on information being supplied to Shearer by the Russian FSB via a Turkish businessman (a friend of Joseph Wilson?): Unpacking the Other Clinton-Linked Russia Dossier. The article notes the role of Robert Baer, a CIA agent involved in the Clinton administration's botched effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who subsequently became involved in spreading propaganda about Nigergate on behalf of VIPS and John Kerry's campaign, and continued to pal around with Valerie Plame after the campaign, into the Obama administration. Baer was feeding Shearer rumors about Trump he had heard from the New York Times in March or April of 2016. Baer told CNN in September 2019 that the CIA and FBI have never trusted Trump.
10 posted on 01/08/2020 11:34:12 PM PST by Fedora
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To: bitt

The State Department, among other agencies needs gutted.


11 posted on 01/09/2020 2:52:44 AM PST by snippy_about_it
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To: bitt

There is was and still no end to the length the Democrats have gone to oust Trump. 0bungo the Kenyan started this mess even before Trump was elected.


12 posted on 01/09/2020 4:13:08 AM PST by okie 54
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Ping


13 posted on 01/09/2020 4:47:51 AM PST by Bob Ireland (The Democrap Party is the enemy of freedom.They use all the seductions and deceits of the Bolshevics)
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To: bitt; ransomnote; little jeremiah
This thread appears to be a treasure trove. Thanks for the ping. I have been occasionally posting how Sid Blumenthal has been too minimized in this whole 'destroy Trump' melee. Confirming how intimately connected to the origins of the Steele Dossier Sid B and Shearer are confirms many suspicions.

What all this proves is another fact I have been pushing: Hillary is behind all this uproar and impeachment; likely there is someone hidden behind HRC but not likely that they will ever be exposed. What is coming to light is that Sidney Blumenthal could have worked with State (HRC & Jn Kerry) and Jn Brennan to set up this whole massive ongoing operation to destroy the Trump presidency.

I pray that AG Barr and Jn Durham are uncovering this huge rat's nest - AND SOON!

14 posted on 01/09/2020 5:11:49 AM PST by Bob Ireland (The Democrap Party is the enemy of freedom.They use all the seductions and deceits of the Bolshevics)
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To: bitt

The entire Obama administration should be investigated along with all those elected Congress and the Senate. Hillary was just the tip of the Communist takeover attempt. That email usage conveyed thousands of classified documents.

The Department of State actually bans private email accounts as any address for anything on the Low (Sensitive but Unclassified) and High (Classified) side.

He violated the 5 Foreign Affairs Manual, for which I personally helped provide evidence for Reprimands while working as an Information Management Specialist at the Department of State at this time period.

When in DC I drive past the Foggy Bottom and inner into the driveway to drop of my wife. She tells me several times a week about her boss, a woman who has Tel-a-worked most of the past 6-months, her colleagues who Tel-a-work Tuesdays and Thursdays, some who just side at their compute clicking a key doing nothing but it keeps the computer system engaged for tracking/verification of “WORK”, per the Contractor IT Staff. There are people who come in 2-hours late and leave 2-hours early and take 2-hour lunches. State has a supervision problem.


15 posted on 01/09/2020 6:06:04 AM PST by Jumper
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To: bitt
I've been curious throughout the Trump Witch Hunt why senior officials such as DAG Rosenstein, Mueller, and others have pointedly said that whatever Trump campaign official who was under investigation and "no other American" were found to have colluded with the Russians. Why have they included the "no other American" phrase?

It's becoming obvious from this and other recent revelations that it was included to deflect any attention from all of the obvious Obama administration officials who actually were colluding with the Russians.

There were, indeed, "Americans" colluding with the Russians. The problem for the investigators was that the only colluders were members of the Obama administration.

16 posted on 01/09/2020 6:12:34 AM PST by norwaypinesavage (Calm down and enjoy the ride, great things are happening for our country)
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To: tired&retired

Guy is a clown.


17 posted on 01/09/2020 6:51:54 AM PST by KC_Conspirator
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To: Fedora

Jonathan Winer is a KEY piece of the Steele Dossier/Deep State Swamp and should not be ignored. The only Marxist “connection” I could find on him was at www.keywiki.org, under his name, when he participated in a N.Y. Marxist School “calendar” discussion/debate a number of years ago.

However, his fingerprints are all over Kerry’s “Contragate/La Penca Bombing” investigations, and other anti-American affairs.


18 posted on 01/09/2020 11:44:27 PM PST by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper (Figures)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; cardinal4; ColdOne; ...
Note: this topic is from 01/08/2020. Thanks bitt.

19 posted on 04/13/2020 7:31:15 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: bitt

If we look hard enough we’ll discover Kerry was ‘in’ with the Chinese too...


20 posted on 04/13/2020 9:00:18 AM PDT by GOPJ (HOW TO For Virus-Free Food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKx-F4AKteE)
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