Thanks to the Grassley/Graham criminal referral, we know that someone at the state department was the middleman between Christopher Steele and two Hillary Clinton associates.
The middleman at the State Department has now outed himself as Jonathan M. Winer, because he’s now being investigated by the House Intel Committee:
WASHINGTON TIMES – A former State Department official has confirmed that he played middleman in relaying anti-Trump smut from two Hillary Clinton operatives to dossier writer Christopher Steele who passed it to the FBI.
It is a further thickening of the plot by Democratic Party agents to get unverified dossier material into the news media and the Obama Justice Department before election day Nov. 8.
Jonathan M. Winer, who was former secretary state John Kerry’s special envoy to Libya and his Senate adviser, disclosed the the behind-the-scenes get-Trump operation in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday.
Mr. Winer confirmed a redacted Senate report released on Tuesday that said information on candidate Trump flowed between Mr. Steele and Clinton operatives, with Mr. Winer as the middleman.
The Hillary Clinton agents are Sidney Blumenthal, a well-known fierce Clinton defender and freelance intelligence gatherer, and his collaborator, Cody Shearer.
Mr. Winer’s disclosures mean that, not only was the Hillary Clinton campaign paying Mr. Steele, but her loyalists were also providing raw intelligence that got incorporated into the Steele dossier and went to the FBI.
Mr. Winer said he shared the dossier charges in a two-page summary with career diplomat Victoria Nuland who said she planned to share it with Mr. Kerry.
Mr. Winer’s op-ed said that Mr. Shearer came up with some of the same salacious allegations as did Mr. Steele.
Mr. Winer said he had accepted Mr. Steele’s previous foreign policy reports and has been an “old friend” of Mr. Blumenthal for decades.
“Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports,” Mr. Winer wrote. “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.”
Mr. Steele had contacted Mr. Winer in what the Senate report, quoting an associate, described as his “desperate” effort to defeat Mr. Trump.
Mr. Winer wrote, “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.”
I’m sure we’ll find out more about this in the next Nunes memo, what Winer wants to admit and what he may be hiding.