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.
OCTOBER 31, 2019
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JUDICIAL WATCH
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.”
Guy is a clown.