I find this interesting not only because of the light it sheds on the Steele dossier, but also and significantly to me, because of how someone Nunes is targeting in his secret investigation has decided to preempt any confidential testimony by publishing his side of the story in advance. It is in today’s Washington Post.
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By the end of the day, if Fox News picks this up, Jonathan M. Winer may end up being attacked in a Trump Tweet.
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Like with the infamous erroneous Nunes memo, the truth when it comes out will end up biting Trump and his minions in their collective asses. Of course, we live in a world where the truth doesn’t matter to a pathetically brainwashed 30% of the population, and to the cowardly members of the GOP in Congress.
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Here’ s what you should know about Jonathan Winer’s background before you see him interviewed on the non-Fox media.
Jonathan M. Winer has been the United States Special Envoy for Libya, the deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, and counsel to United States Senator John Kerry. He has written and lectured widely on U.S. Middle East policy, counter-terrorism, international money laundering, illicit networks, corruption, and U.S.-Russia issues.
In 2016, Winer received the highest award granted by the Secretary of State, for “extraordinary service to the U.S. government” in avoiding the massacre of over 3,000 members of an Iranian dissident group in Iraq, and for leading U.S. policy in Libya “from a major foreign policy embarrassment to a fragile but democratic, internationally recognized government.” In 1999, he received the Department’s second highest award, for having “created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions." The award stated that "the scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official." From The Middle East Institue
From Jonathan M. Winer in The Washington Post:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced last week that the next phase of his investigation of the events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will focus on the State Department. His apparent area of interest is my relationship with former British intelligence professional Christopher Steele and my role in material that Steele ultimately shared with the FBI.
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In 1999 Winer left the State Department and developed a legal and consulting practice that often involved Russian matters. In the course of that work, he met Christoper Steele in 2009 and they became friends.
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In the summer of 2016, Steele told Winer "that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials. He did not provide details but made clear the information involved “active measures,” a Soviet intelligence term for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries."
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Then in, September 2016, he met with Steele in Washington and discussed the information in the so-called dossier which "suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign." He reviewed but was not allowed to keep a copy of the report, prepared a two-page summary, and shared it with the State Department through Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat he knew who was then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. She felt that the information needed to be shared with Secretary of State Kerry.
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There’s more (my emphasis added)
In late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investigating the Iran-contra affair for then-Sen. Kerry and Blumenthal was a reporter at The Post. At the time, Russian hacking was at the front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails of Blumenthal, who had a long association with Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been hacked in 2013 through a Russian server.
While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. 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.
What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.
On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction. He 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.
Is there a point when Nunes will realize that the more he learns about Christopher Steele, a modern day 007, and the incriminating information in the dossier about Trump and his campaign, he will realize that he is aiding and abetting someone who was not only un-American, but who committed treason?
Friday, Feb 9, 2018 · 6:47:00 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Also in the WaPo today:
Devin Nunes’s laughable spin to protect Trump crashes and burns
One of the most comical — or perhaps deeply troubling — aspects of the massive effort by President Trump and his allies to create an alternate narrative to the Russia probe is that it continues unabated, even as the numerous conspiracy theories created to bolster it have, one after another, fallen like dominoes.
This morning, Post fact checker Glenn Kessler offers a comprehensive look at various threads of this alt-narrative that helps illustrate just how buffoonish this whole effort has become. Kessler takes as his starting point a remarkable statement from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who is perhaps Trump’s staunchest bodyguard against accountability on Capitol Hill. Nunes said this in a radio interview:
“The truth is that they [Democrats] are covering up that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump to feed it to the FBI to open up an investigation into the other campaign.”
In a sense, this is a perfect one-sentence distillation of the whole alt-narrative, because it turns the facts entirely upside down: The story isn’t that the Trump campaign may have conspired with a concerted Russian effort to sabotage our democracy that has been documented by U.S. intelligence services. It’s that Clintonactually colluded with Russia to undermine the Trump candidacy — this is the real sense in which Russia sabotaged our democracy — and that the real role of the Deep State was to assist in that effort to swing the election, which, of course, continues today with the Deep State Plot to Remove Trump.