Fitton: Obama State Department’s Meeting on ‘Russia Matter’ in 2016

The Obama State Department was central to the effort to target President Trump with the Russia smear. Judicial Watch has obtained new emails showing that senior Obama State Department officials advanced the Russiagate hoax just before the 2016 presidential election.

With The Daily Caller News Foundation, Judicial Watch has released 84 pages of documents, including a September 2016 email exchange between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, a close associate of dossier author Christopher Steele, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”

(In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.)

According to an op-ed Winer wrote for The Washington Post in 2018, also in September 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the dossier … I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”

The documents Judicial Watch obtained 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 was revealed.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation against the State Department after it failed to respond to three separate FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv- 00968)). The lawsuit seeks:

• All records of communications between State Department officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the one hand, and British National Christopher Steele and/or employees or contractors of Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, on the other hand.
• All records and/or memoranda provided by Christopher Steele and/or his firm Orbis Business Intelligence or by others acting on Steele’s/Orbis’s behalf, to State Department officials.
• Any and all records in the custody of the State Department related to the provision of documents to British national Christopher Steele and/or his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, or the receipt of documents from Steele or his firm. Time period is January 20, 2009 through the present.
• All records created in 2016 by Jonathan M. Winer relating to research compiled by Christopher Steele.

A September 17, 2016, email exchange between Nuland and Winer – which was classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy – discusses the political situation in Libya, but also brings up a “Russian matter:”

Other emails show senior State Department personnel using unsecure BlackBerrys to transmit classified information even after the Clinton email scandal became public.

Here is some background on these characters.

Judicial Watch recently released 16 pages of documents revealing that Nuland and Winer coordinated with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele.

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 Donald Trump taking office.

In a related lawsuit, Judicial Watch is suing the State Department communications between Ambassador Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.

Judicial Watch recently released 41 pages of documents from the State Department revealing 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.

Winer was implicated in working with Steele and Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal to circulate the anti-Trump dossier.

I talked about the dossier-linked State Department officials with Hannity last night. See the interview here.