A Republic Under Assault
Page 7
“It’s amazing how hard our government tries to keep the truth from the American people,” noted Neil Patel, the president of the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Thankfully, with Judicial Watch filing a lawsuit on our behalf, we have been able to uncover phony dossier author Christopher Steele’s previously hidden contacts with the Obama State Department.”
THE STATE DEPARTMENT WORKS OVERTIME TO UNDERMINE TRUMP
The “Obama-Kerry-Clinton” State Department was a multiheaded monster that quickly became a nest of desperate anti-Trump activity.
I remain astonished by the ninety pages of heavily redacted U.S. Department of State documents we uncovered detailing Obama State Department officials’ efforts to disseminate classified information to multiple U.S. senators immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration.3
The information, which included raw intelligence, purported to show “malign” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Among the senators receiving the classified documents were Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), and then anti-Trump Republican senator Robert Corker from Tennessee.
We obtained the documents through our June 2018 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a February 2018 request seeking records of the Obama State Department’s last-minute efforts to share classified information about Russia election interference issues with Democratic senator Ben Cardin (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State [No. 1:18-cv-01381]).
A January 13, 2017, email from Hera Abbasi, a former congressional adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Legislative Affairs, suggests that the intelligence community was providing “raw intel” to Senator Warner. Such an exchange almost certainly would have been coordinated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): “Yes, that is correct. Warner/raw intel stuff is going thru IC channels.” (Abbasi previously worked in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and was a 2017 Next Generation National Security Fellow at the liberal Center for a New American Security. Abbasi donated $725 to the Clinton campaign and Act Blue during the 2016 election cycle.)
The documents show that early in the process of gathering and clearing classified information—beginning a day after Senator Warner formally asked Secretary of State John Kerry for “intelligence products” and “raw intelligence” on Russian involvement in the 2016 election—Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield brings Senior Advisor and Investigations Counsel Zachary Schram into the loop in a January 5, 2017, email chain, in which she says Schram would help “figure out the best way to get these to the Hill.” Frifield was an Obama appointee who previously served as Maryland Democratic senator Barbara Mikulski’s chief of staff. (Frifield contributed $2,700 to the 2016 Clinton campaign.)
On January 11, 2017, former State Department senior congressional advisor Kathrine Harris sends an email to Abbasi; Naz Durakoglu, who was a senior advisor to the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs; Kathleen Kavalec; and others that seems to confirm they were breaking the rules to get Trump: “If we are not going through our standard CDP [Collection Due Process] process, others in H need to weigh in on how to move these to the Hill.”
In emails written on January 10 and 11, 2017, from Abbasi to Durakoglu and Kavalec, Abassi expresses the need to get the documents cleared “as soon as possible (ASAP).”
On January 17, 2017, three days before Trump’s inauguration, Kavalec emails Abbasi, Durakoglu, and others emphasizing, again, that getting the documents to Cardin and Warner is a priority and urges the process to be sped up:
Agree this is a priority… and I don’t see why lengthy reviews are required. I would suggest we send up the things that can go immediately, and if there is any concern about specific internal documents, those be adjudicated separately and sent up as a follow-on.
In a January 18, 2017, email from Naz Durakoglu to Elizabeth Lawrence, Abbasi, former Foreign Service officer Kerem Bilge, and others regarding the processing of the request, Durakoglu writes, “there is a time sensitivity to these docs.”
Shedding additional light on possible irregularities in the release process, a January 17, 2017, email reveals that ODNI, then led by James Clapper, was involved in clearing cables for release to the Hill. State Department official Cody Walsh emails Schram and Lauren Gills that the ODNI is “fine” with the State Department “sharing… cables with the Hill.”
On January 13, 2017, at 10:27 a.m., Durakoglu emails more than a dozen State Department employees, invoking the name of then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland to reiterate the need to accelerate the process of getting materials prepared to go to the Hill: “Hi All. This is a priority for our Assistant Secretary… Is there anything we can do to better facilitate the process?”
Two minutes later, Durakoglu emails Kerem Bilge and two others: “Where are we on clearances? Do I need to ask Toria to raise with Julia? The clock is ticking.” Durakoglu, at the time, was a senior advisor to Nuland. Durakoglu currently works for the Atlantic Council. She contributed $1,600 to the Clinton campaign in 2016.
The concluding, unredacted section of an otherwise heavily redacted email sent on Friday, January 13, 2017, by Kerem Bilge to numerous State employees indicates the intense time pressure under which State officials were operating to beat the Inauguration Day deadline:
**** Please clear the action memo by noon TUESDAY [Jan. 17].
**** Please clear on the actual package of documents, if you have not done so already, by noon TUESDAY [Jan. 17]. [Emphasis in original]
I want to get the whole package into the EUR front office today. This means we can get it out of EUR and to M [Undersecretary for Management] on Wednesday [Jan. 18], then H can courier it to the Hill on Thursday [Jan 19].
In a January 18, 2017, email, as time was running out, Elizabeth Lawrence described getting the package of cables to Cardin and Warner as “urgent”: “This is an urgent package from EUR that they’re trying to get to the Hill ASAP. Please review so we can get it up to M.” (Lawrence is a career foreign service officer, now the Consul in New Delhi, and was previously a Foreign Policy Advisor to Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin. A DC-based State Department employee, her name is on record as having donated a cumulative total of $1,000 to the Clinton campaign in 2016.)
The final batch of cables was stored in Kavalec’s safe.
President Trump was inaugurated less than twenty-four hours later.
These documents show how the Obama State Department, staffed by Clinton donors, improperly, and perhaps illegally, rushed classified information to their anti-Trump allies in the U.S. Senate. The Obama State Department was central to the conspiracy to smear President Trump with Russiagate lies and innuendo. The Justice Department must expand any Spygate criminal investigation to include this agency.
We also uncovered other documents showing classified information was researched and disseminated 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 Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Senator Robert Corker (R-TN). A January 19, 2017, email from Durakoglu sums it up: “We made the deadline! Thank you everyone for what was truly a Department-wide effort!”
Made the deadline? If the dissemination of this material was appropriate, why would Inauguration Day be a “deadline”? It is only a deadline, it seems, because shoveling classified information out the door to political allies on the Hill was an essential part of a get-Trump effort. We also previously released an 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 May 2019, we uncovered documents showing a conversation between Kavalec and former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, discussing the targeting of
Donald Trump with Steele dossier material.
In June, we made public documents revealing that State Department “Special Coordinator for Libya” Jonathan Winer played a key role in facilitating Steele’s access to other top government officials and prominent international business executives.
We also uncovered documents showing Nuland and Winer coordinating with then House minority whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor, Daniel Silverberg, to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Steele.
Are you beginning to see the pattern here? That pattern being: “Smear Trump at any price.”
Once again, what happens to a free society and nation when those tasked with protecting it turn against their duties and oaths for their own partisan and personal means?
By “smearing Trump” and attempting to take him down, many in our powerful and secretive spy agencies made a mockery of their oaths while unleashing themselves against the rule of law. And once they did, the Justice Department and the FBI made it purposefully difficult for us and even Congress to get to the bottom of it.
Too bad for them. Judicial Watch is always eager to get to the bottom of it.
CHRISTOPHER STEELE JUMPS INTO BED WITH TOP OBAMA STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS
Of course, to have as massive a conspiracy as we are describing above, you need conspirators and co-conspirators.
Christopher Steele was one of the first to step forward. In fact, he oozed into the State Department much earlier than suspected. But it was no surprise to us, as we were onto him from practically the very start.
As mentioned earlier, Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation released 146 pages of State Department documents revealing that former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department officials.4
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that, from May 2014 to November 2015, Steele filed dozens of reports with his close associate at State, Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, who would then pass them to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The reports focused mainly on the Russia-Ukraine crisis and U.S. sanctions on Russia.
The documents show that Steele’s work was also distributed to State Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy Daniel Fried and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Paul Jones, whose focus in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs was on Russia and Ukraine policy.
By way of example, an early Steele report was passed by Winer to Nuland on May 19, 2014. It discusses Russia-Ukraine policy. Winer writes: “Toria, another piece that is not in my lane but which I wished to pass on to you. My friend Chris Steele (Orbis Intelligence, former MI-6 Russia expert), provided me the enclosed memo yesterday, describing a recent conversation (redacted) on Russian Ukraine policy. As I was provided it from a person in private sector, I am treating it as low side.”
In a November 20, 2014, email exchange, Winer offers to introduce Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Paul Jones to Steele while Steele was to be in town, and he provides Jones and Nuland with three Steele reports, discussing: “Ukraine looking towards [redacted]”; “Ukraine economy shrinking due to loss of East [redacted]”; and “President Putin’s current priorities [redacted].” Winer writes to Jones: “Paul, if you are still free, does 3 pm work to meet with Chris Steele? I would pick him up downstairs, get him to your office, and sit in. Will be sending you another Orbis report regardless in a few minutes, it just arrived but I haven’t had chance to open it and manicure it yet.”
These new documents show that Clinton spy Christopher Steele had an outsized influence, to put it mildly, at the Obama State Department that proved useful when the Clinton campaign needed help smearing Trump in 2016 and beyond. Steele, you can see, was not just a tool of the Clinton campaign, but was an operative of the Kerry State Department. The documents show Steele shared nearly three dozen reports with Obama-run Foggy Bottom—before Russiagate. He may as well as have had a desk at the Obama State Department.
In May 2019, a related Judicial Watch lawsuit produced information from the DOJ showing a conversation between former deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs Kathleen 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 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.” You can see that Ohr had it in for Trump.
In March 2019, Judicial Watch uncovered emails from Bruce Ohr showing that he remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS contractor Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI confidential informant. The records show that Ohr served as a go-between for Steele by passing along information to “his colleagues” on matters relating to Steele’s activities. Ohr also set up meetings with Steele, regularly talked to him on the telephone, and provided him assistance in dealing with situations Steele was confronting with the media.
RUSSIANS? WHO WAS REALLY DEALING WITH THEM?
As we have been outlining, Steele, Ohr, and a number of others were either in direct contact with Russian assets, or were being used by those Russian intelligence operatives.
We uncovered blockbuster State Department documents revealing that on December 23, 2016, twenty-eight days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, State Department special coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer had a ten-minute phone call with Alexey Vladimirovich Skosyrev, the “political chief” at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C.5
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 readout 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 to 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].” It is shameful that the Deep State Department, as President Trump has called it, is covering up the details of this Russia collusion by the Obama administration. But we can see how 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.
Judicial Watch also uncovered State Department 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 2014 with Winer and Nuland.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL IMITATES HILLARY TO USE PERSONAL EMAIL IN SECRET AND CORRUPT WAYS
Those out to get Trump were seemingly disseminating false or invented information after he announced his candidacy; during his campaign; hours before he took offi
ce; hours after he took office; and ever since.
As you are learning, no matter when or where we looked, we continued to find evidence of Department of Justice, FBI, State Department, and other Deep State activists acting as one to get out that fake information with the express goal of bringing down candidate and then President Trump.
As we all know, much of this is either learned behavior, or being done to impress someone important and to curry favor with them.
One such person all of these conspirators and coconspirator continually wanted to impress or emulate was: Hillary Clinton.
And to be sure, Hillary Clinton loves to be a role model… for those she can use. Most especially it seems, when she is schooling others on the art of deception.
We surmise this because people in Obama’s State Department other than Hillary Clinton were oblivious, to put it charitably, to the fact that using personal email for government business is a security risk and can also thwart federal record-keeping laws.
We uncovered the use of personal email by a State Department official involved with the notorious British spy Steele.
In our lawsuit filed together with the Daily Caller News Foundation we uncovered eleven pages of State Department documents revealing a discussion about the use of private email to transmit potentially sensitive information from Steele.6
We obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf 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)).
Here’s the story.