Victoria Nuland, President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs from September 2013 until January 2017, has been linked to the notorious anti-Trump dossier fabricated by Hillary Clinton’s opposition research firm.

The author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, reportedly had developed long-standing relationships with senior State Department officials, including Nuland. “Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the State Department and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis.”

To understand better how the dossier’s spurious charges were spread around the Obama administration, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for communications between Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.

Judicial Watch sued because the State Department failed to respond to our November 1, 2018, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:19-cv-00574)). They are seeking:

Any and all records of communication between Ambassador Victoria Nuland and any of the following individuals between January 1, 2016, and January 25, 2017:
Professor Joseph Mifsud
Mr. Christopher Steele
Mr. Glenn Simpson
Mrs. Nellie Ohr
Former CIA Director John Brennan
Former Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates
Former Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin
Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas
Former DOJ Official David Laufman
Former Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco
Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr
Former FBI Director James Comey
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok
FBI Attorney Lisa Page
FBI Attorney James Baker
Former FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki
FBI Assistant Director Edward William Priestap
Former FBI Agent John Giacalone
Former FBI Agent Michael Steinbach
Former FBI Agent Josh Campbell

On February 4, 2018, in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Nuland stated that she had been given details of the anti-Trump dossier directly from Christopher Steele, which she then referred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation:

[Steele] passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding. And our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That’s something for the FBI to investigate. And that was our reaction when we saw this. It’s not our – our – we can’t evaluate this.

Nuland reportedly “green lit” the initial meeting about the anti-Trump dossier between Christopher Steele and FBI agent Michael Gaeta. Quoting from David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s book Russian Roulette, “The FBI checked with Victoria Nuland’s office at the State Department: Do you support this meeting? Nuland, having found Steele’s reports on Ukraine to have been generally credible, gave the green light.”

Judicial Watch intends to find out how far the Deep State was willing to go in their effort to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump. There clearly was an Obama administration no-holds-barred attempt to clear the path to the presidency for Hillary Clinton. Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuits have already shown the Obama State Department was corruptly targeting President Trump.

Judicial Watch already exposed elements of the plot when we released 42 pages of heavily redacted State Department documents containing classified information that was provided to Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. The documents show Russian political interference in elections and politics in countries across Europe.

And then they released more heavily redacted State documents showing classified information was desperately sent to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).