2009 : (Jonathan Winer and Christpher Steele meet and become friends) 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.
2013 (Jonathan Winer goes back to work at the State Dept -— see Obama-Biden Admin, John Kerry) 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 (2013-2015), I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.”
December 2014 : (Paul Jones emails Jonathan Winer) “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.” -— Epoch Times