16 pages of documents gathered through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) leaves no doubt State Department officials under former president Obama orchestrated events before and following the revelation of the infamous Steele Dossier.
FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552 provided documents that show Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer worked with House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and National Security Advisor Daniel Silverberg to coordinate their work on the dossier information provided by foreign agent Christopher Steele.
Winer was the Obama State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary who has been implicated in working with Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal and Steele to ensure the anti-Trump dossier made its way to the press.
To follow the trail of the coordinated coup attempt, it is important to remember that the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign financed Steele’s work through Fusion GPS.
The FBI later used the dossier to justify a series of FISA warrants that targeted foreign policy adviser for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Carter Page.
The release of a classified memo the FBI sought to repress shows that top officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI misled federal judges by not revealing the source and funding of the Steele dossier.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents as the result of a lawsuit it filed on April 25, 2018. Before that, the State Department had failed to respond to three different FOIA requests.
Most revealing is an email exchange dated December 12, 2016, between Winer and Nuland in which they discussed the dossier.
Over two years later (February 2018), Winer wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which he said, “In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.”
Christopher Bedford, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller News Foundation said of those documents, “Every day of digging reveals more and more political collaboration on this hit job, and at the highest levels. While so much of the media is content to chase Russian conspiracies, The Daily Caller News Foundation and the fantastic lawyers at Judicial Watch are going to keep doing the hard work of holding power accountable.”
Breitbart News reports that Judicial Watch earlier released 43 pages of previously classified State Department documents that show Jonathan Winer, played a key role in providing access to top government officials and prominent international business executives for Steele.
Judicial Watch has also released two sets of highly redacted State Department documents that show classified information was disseminated to a number of U.S. senators by the Obama administration just prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Among those Senators were Sen. Mark Warner (Dem-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (Dem-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (Rep-TN).
Those documents further confirm the Obama State Department headed by John Kerry served as a clearinghouse for Steele’s anti-Trump dossier as well as other anti-Trump activism.
Up to this time, Congressional investigations concerning the genesis and dissemination of the Steele Dossier have been focused on the Department of Justice and the FBI. Though they are still under investigation, it looks like Attorney General William Barr and Congressional Republicans have widened their net.
The book, Collusion: Secret meetings, dirty money, and how Russia helped Donald Trump win the election, published last November by a Guardian correspondent, shows that Steele came to be trusted by State Department officials due to his writings on the 2010 World Cup soccer corruption investigation.
Some have claimed the FBI and the Justice Department were misled to believe Steele had credible information that pointed to Russian interference and coordination with the Trump campaign.
These recently released documents tell a different story. The only way former president Barack Obama didn’t at least know about the work of Winer and others would be if he was willfully ignorant or inept. We agree with his admirers at this point – Obama is neither.
That leaves a sitting President ordering or allowing his State and Justice Departments to coordinate what can only be called a coup.
Carter Page told Real Clear Politics, “[I have] experienced firsthand the witch hunt that [President Trump] had to live through … The fact that he has achieved so much is just absolutely extraordinary in the face of all that.”
We couldn’t say it better. It doesn’t take just guns and tanks to start a coup.
