Unpacking the Other Clinton-Linked Russia Dossier
Unpacking the Other Clinton-Linked Russia Dossier
A
copy of the little-publicized second dossier in the Trump-Russia
affair, acquired by RealClearInvestigations, raises new questions about
the origins of the Trump investigation, particularly about the role of
Clinton partisans and the extent to which the two dossiers may have been
coordinated or complementary operations.
Sidney Blumenthal, who passed the Shearer
dossier on to Jonathan Winer at the State Department. (Top photo:
anti-Trump sartorial statement.)
AP Photos
The second dossier -- two reports compiled by Cody Shearer, an
ex-journalist and longtime Clinton operative -- echoes many of the lurid
and still unsubstantiated claims made in the Steele dossier, and is
receiving new scrutiny. On Sunday, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee,
said in a TV interview
that his panel is shifting its investigative focus concerning the
origins of the Russia investigation from the FBI to the State
Department. This probe will include the Shearer dossier.
In late September 2016, Sidney Blumenthal, a close Clinton confidant
and colleague of Shearer’s, passed Shearer’s dossier on to State
Department official Jonathan M. Winer, a longtime aide to John Kerry on
Capitol Hill and at Foggy Bottom.
According to Winer’s account
in a Feb. 8, 2018 Washington Post op-ed, he shared the contents of the
Shearer dossier with the author of the first dossier, ex-British spy
Christopher Steele, who submitted part of it to the FBI to further
substantiate his own investigation into the Trump campaign. Steele was a
subcontractor working for the Washington, D.C.-based communications
firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
campaign and the Democratic National Committee to compile opposition
research on her Republican opponent.
Jonathan Winer, who passed Shearer material on to Christopher Steele.
State Department
Steele’s 35-page dossier was used as evidence in October 2016 to
secure from a secret court a surveillance warrant on volunteer Trump
campaign adviser Carter Page. Among issues the intelligence panel will
likely want clarified is whether the FBI also used Shearer’s material as
evidence in obtaining the FISA warrant.
Shearer did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.
Attempts to reach Winer by email were unsuccessful. And efforts to reach
Blumenthal through his publisher were unsuccessful.
The copy of the Shearer memo provided to RealClearInvestigations is
made up of two four-page reports, one titled “Donald Trump—Background
Notes—The Compromised Candidate,” the other “FSB Interview” – the
initials standing for the Russian Federal Security Service.
The
only Trump campaign figures named are Donald Trump himself and his
former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, misspelled as “Manniford.”
Shearer may be hinting at a third person when he quotes, without
substantiation, a Turkish businessman saying a Russian source knows of a
“cut out” or intermediary through whom the prospective “president of
the U.S.” would communicate “into President Putin’s office." The version of the two memos RCI has seen is undated.
Christopher Steele, whose dossier has many similarities to the Shearer dossier.
Victoria Jones/PA via AP
For the first report, Shearer claims he interviewed journalists and
various media personalities, as well as the unnamed Turkish businessman
with “excellent contacts within the FSB.” The businessman appears to be
relaying information from what Shearer describes as the Turk’s “FSB
guy.” The second report, “FSB Interview,” is an account of an interview
with a source identified as an FSB agent. It’s not clear if the Turkish
businessman’s FSB source in the first report is the same person Shearer
interviews in the second. Neither is named.
The first Shearer report, “Donald Trump—Background Notes,” begins much like the Steele dossier.
It alleges that Trump has been compromised by Russia and has engaged in
illegal financial transactions with Russian figures: “At a time in the
early l990’s when he was under severe financial stress Donald Trump
visited Moscow in search of investors,” writes Shearer.
“Since the Trump name wasn’t worth
much at that stage,” Shearer continues, “Trump’s only luck was in
establishing relationships with oligarchs who needed someone to help
them launder their money; which is what Trump did in return for some
capital.” Shearer offers no source for these allegations, or proof of
these transactions.
Like the Steele dossier, Shearer’s
memo passes along unsubstantiated gossip about Trump’s sex life:
According to Shearer’s FSB source, it was “From observing Trump for
years in previous visits to Moscow, the FSB knew he had a weakness for
women.”
Shearer’s FSB source told him “that he knew that Trump eventually
learned that he had been flipped in a honeypot operation in Moscow.”
Shearer’s memo echoes the most notorious, and salacious, item in the
Steele dossier. Shearer’s FSB source claims that Trump was “filmed twice
in Moscow in November 2013, during the Miss Universe pageant. Once in
the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.” The FSB source
“believes a copy of the sex videos is in Bulgaria, Israel and FSB
political unit vaults in Moscow."
Shearer claims that his Turkish businessman source is able to confirm
in 15 minutes with a phone call to his “FSB guy” that Trump was
“compromised.” Shearer writes in the first report that he has “asked the
FSB source for documentation, photos and other related materials and
talking sources who will verify this story.” Evidently, none were made
available to Shearer.
Devin Nunes's House committee is looking into the Shearer dossier.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
As in the Steele dossier, Shearer’s ostensible Russian sources
explain that the explicit purpose of the FSB operation is to elect
Trump. The Turk’s FSB source says it was “launched with a wild-eyed
fantasy of electing someone president of the U.S. who communicated
through a cut out into President Putin’s office.”
Again as in the Steele dossier, there are allegations of Russia
stealing Clinton emails and tampering with voting machines. According to
the Turkish businessman’s contact: “The Trump operation also involved
hacking his opponents and trying to alter votes on election day.”
The Shearer memos also describe a split in Russia’s ruling circles, a
la the Steele dossier. One side is eager to help Trump, another thinks
it’s unwise to get in the middle of American politics. Shearer’s FSB
source presents himself as a member of the moderate faction. He claims
he is spilling the beans to Shearer in order to help restore U.S.-Russia
relations. Shearer’s source says: “By helping expose and embarrass
Putin in regards to what he has done with Trump—which has spiraled out
of control—might eventually improve relations between the U.S. and
Russia; because what he has done is dangerous.”
Was the Shearer Dossier Used for the FISA Warrant?
Rep. Nunes is not the first
Republican to question what role the Shearer memo may have played in the
FBI’s investigation into the Trump team and its possible role in
securing the warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Chairman Charles Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham of the Senate
Judiciary Committee alluded
to the Shearer document in a memorandum attached to a Jan. 4, 2018
letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein referring Steele to the Department of Justice for a criminal
inquiry. In their redacted classified memorandum, the two Republican
senators hint at the possibility that the FBI’s probe into the Trump
team’s possible ties to Russia is the result of an operation managed by
the Clinton inner circle.
Sens. Charles Grassley, pointing, and Lindsey Graham, far left.
Associated Press
“One memorandum by Mr. Steele that was not published by BuzzFeed is
dated October 19, 2016,” write Grassley and Graham. “Mr. Steele’s
memorandum states that his company ‘received this report from [REDACTED]
US State Department,’ that the report was second in a series, and that
the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who ‘is
in touch with [REDACTED], a contact of [REDACTED], a friend of the
Clintons, who passed it to [REDACTED].’ It is troubling enough that the
Clinton campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton
associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele’s allegations
raises additional concerns about his credibility.”
Writing in his Feb. 8 Washington Post op-ed about getting the Shearer
memo from Sidney Blumenthal in September 2016, Obama State Department
official Winer explained that soon after the Blumenthal meeting, he met
with Christopher Steele. Winer had known Steele, a longtime associate
who often used Winer as his point of contact at the State Department.
Steele had shown Winer the memos he’d written on Trump’s possible ties
to Russia.
Winer asserted that in reading
Shearer’s memo, he was “struck … how some of the material echoed
Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.” He shared Shearer’s
memo with Steele, who described it as “potentially ‘collateral’
information,” presumably to buttress his own findings. The FBI, as Winer
explained, had asked Steele to provide any supporting information. From
the Grassley-Graham letter, it appears that Steele gave the FBI the
Shearer report titled “FSB Interview,” “the second in a series.” He
either withheld the first, "The Compromisaed Candidate" report, or Winer
never gave it to him.
During the same period, late summer
and early fall, the FBI was seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page. A
Department of Justice spokesperson declined comment when RCI emailed to
ask if the Shearer memo was used as part of the Steele dossier to secure the warrant on Page’s communications that was granted Oct. 21, 2016.
When news of the Shearer memo broke more than a year later, the Guardian reported
in a Jan. 30, 2018 article that the FBI “is still assessing details in
the ‘Shearer memo’ and is pursuing intriguing leads.” The memo, the
Guardian explained, “was initially viewed with skepticism, not least
because he had shared it with select media organizations before the
election.”
Even as his FSB memo was provided to
the FBI before the election, it appears that Shearer was shopping his
information to press outfits while also comparing rumors with leading
journalists. Shearer’s first report, “The Compromised Candidate,” is a
record of various journalists and media personalities explaining how
they’ve heard the same rumors, and even tried, unsuccessfully, to report
the story that Shearer is pushing in the second report.
For instance, according to the first report, Brian Ross from ABC News
told Shearer that he, too, heard Trump was “compromised sexually in
Moscow right before the beauty contest he was hosting.”
Ross was suspended
by ABC News after incorrectly reporting that Trump had directed
campaign adviser, and later National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn to
make contact with Russian officials before the 2016 election. Shearer
writes in his memo that Ross told him that if there were a “talking head
source” who could corroborate Shearer’s claims regarding Trump’s sexual
activities in Russia, “[Ross] would fly to Moscow to tape and air for
broadcast” an interview with the source. After I emailed Ross for
comment, an ABC spokesperson responded to say that ABC does not “comment
on our reporting process.”
Robert Baer.
C-SPAN/Wikimedia Commons
In the same report, Shearer quotes a conversation with former CIA
officer Robert Baer, again hinting at another intermediary between the
Trump campaign and the Russian government. Shearer writes that Baer told
him “the Russians had established an encrypted communication system
with a cut out between the Trump campaign and Putin.”
Baer told RCI that “he’d heard that story from acquaintances at the New York Times who were trying to run the story down.”
Baer said he remembered speaking with
Shearer about Trump and Russia in “March or April” of 2016. If Baer’s
memory is correct then Shearer was investigating the Trump story at
around the same time the Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS
to compile opposition research on the Trump campaign.
Shearer writes in his first report
that he was told by Alan Cullison of the Wall Street Journal that Fusion
GPS principals, and former Journal reporters, Glenn Simpson and Peter
Fritsch (Shearer misspells both names in the memo) had been hired by the
DNC to “rack [sic] down Trump compromised story.”
In a Feb. 9, 2018 Wall Street Journal story about the Shearer memo and the appearance of a Journal employee, Cullison, in one of Shearer’s two reports, a spokesman for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal, disputed Shearer’s claim.
“Among the many inaccuracies in Mr.
Shearer’s account of his conversations with our reporter in summer 2016
is his claim that the Journal knew who was funding Fusion GPS’s
efforts,” Steve Severinghaus told the Journal . “The WSJ reporter had no
such knowledge until it became public.”
The inaccuracies in Shearer’s account
fuel suspicions that he misidentified the source of the information on
who was funding the Steele dossier. What matters is that Shearer knew
who was paying for Fusion GPS’s work on Trump. More important, if Steele
received both of Shearer’s reports in September 2016, that would
contradict the information in the FBI’s warrant application that said
Steele didn’t know who was paying for his work. The source of the
funding was right there in Shearer's first memo. The FBI's warrant
application, however, says Simpson “never advised Source No. 1 [Mr. Steele] as to the motivation behind the research into candidate’s #1 [Mr. Trump’s] ties to Russia.” If Steele had both of Shearer’s reports, he knew he was being paid by the DNC.
Michael Isikoff.
Wikimedia Commons
The members of the press corps whom
Simpson and Steele were briefing during that period almost certainly
knew who was paying. Shearer’s notes, according to the Feb. 9, 2018
Journal article, “circulated in political and journalistic circles in
Washington in late 2016.” Whoever saw both of Shearer’s reports would
have known that the DNC was paying for the Fusion GPS campaign—long
before the information became public a year later, in October 2017.
Cullison, who declined to comment for
this story, was the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow correspondent for 20
years. The memo has him telling Shearer that since May 2016 he, too, had
been looking into rumors of Trump’s activities in Moscow, including
allegations of his sexual activities.
“Our reporter was unable to
corroborate these allegations,” WSJ spokesperson Severinghaus said in
the February Journal article, “and determined the information provided
by Mr. Shearer did not meet our high standards for fair and accurate
reporting.”
To this date, no journalist has been able to confirm on its own any
of the incendiary allegations of Trump-Russia collusion story since the
rumors surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. The first
accounts of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia were published
by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News (Sept. 23, 2016) and David Corn of
Mother Jones (Oct. 31). Both were sourced to Steele’s research.
Shearer’s first report shows that the story was circulating through
the press corps for months, and no one was able to confirm it.
Shearer tried to drum up interest in
the collusion narrative but no one in the press was biting. No one was
willing to sink time and prestige on material sourced to unnamed Russian
intelligence officials that was provided by a Clinton political
operative whose partner, Sidney Blumenthal, had an even more
controversial reputation.
But it would be different if it came from someone else, an
intelligence operative whose American handlers worked up a suitable
legend of his exploits in a glamorous, allied clandestine service, and
his deep knowledge of all things Russian. So what did it matter if
Steele had become an executive in a corporate intelligence firm whose
official cover had been blown a decade before and who hadn’t been to
Russia in years? The byline of a former MI6 agent could credential a
compendium of unsubstantiated rumors when the names of Clinton
confederates Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal could not.
Shearer, Blumenthal and Their Clinton Pedigrees
Cody Shearer was raised in a media family, which was also a Clinton
family. His father was Lloyd Shearer, who wrote a Hollywood gossip
column for Parade magazine under the pseudonym Walter Scott. The
Shearers’ Brentwood, Calif., home, says a source who knows the Shearer
family, “was a real West Coast political center. You’d find actors and
TV people rubbing elbows with politicians, like Bill Clinton. The
Shearer kids all hitched their wagons to the Clintons. And once he
became president they all came with him to Washington.”
The eldest Shearer sibling, Derek,
became Clinton’s ambassador to Finland. Cody’s late twin sister, Brooke,
served as an aide to Hillary Clinton during the 1992 campaign and later
worked in the Clinton White House. Brooke also worked as a private investigator for Terry Lenzner, who helped dig up dirt on one of Bill Clinton’s accusers, Paula Corbin Jones.
Brooke Shearer was married to Clinton’s former Oxford classmate
Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration.
Talbott is now president of Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Cody Shearer apparently traded on his brother-in-law’s position.
In the mid-’90s, during the middle of
the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Shearer represented himself to
associates of Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic as an agent of the
State Department. Shearer told
his Serbian contacts that he was in contact with Talbott, as well as
President Clinton. The Serbs gave Shearer at least $25,000 in exchange
for the help he promised in ameliorating impending war crimes charges
against Karadzic. It’s not clear whether his promised assistance helped,
since Karadzic was found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes
against humanity in 2016 at the International Criminal Tribunal. Talbott
reportedly knew of his brother-in-law’s efforts but was unsuccessful in
stopping him.
“Cody was the black sheep of the family,” says the Shearer family
acquaintance. “No one really knew what he was going to do for a living,
and lots of people are still unsure what he does. When he went to
Washington, he got close to Sidney Blumenthal.”
Bill Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal.
Sharon Farmer/Wikimedia Commons
Blumenthal is the former Washington Post and New Yorker writer who
earned enmity from some of his colleagues for using his pen and position
to defend the Clintons and attack their rivals. In 1997, he joined the
White House as a senior adviser. When he took that job, the joke within
the White House press corps was that Blumenthal should put in for “back
pay.”
It surprised few veterans of the
White House press corps that Blumenthal and Fusion GPS would surface
together in the Trump-Russia story.
Simpson has previously described what
he does as “journalism-for-hire,” and his organization provides
journalists with enough leads for stories and sources that many print
and broadcast outlets in Washington and New York consider him a valued
asset. And few journalists have been willing to bite the hand that feeds
them. As one Fusion GPS target, William Browder, told me last year, “I
discovered that Glenn Simpson was so deeply embedded as a source for
different stories, no one wanted to write a story about him.”
But the “Steele dossier” is an
example of another kind of service that Fusion GPS offers
clients—partisan attacks disguised as journalism, such as the smear campaign in defense of Venezuelan oligarchs whose corruption was revealed by journalists Alek Boyd and Thor Halvorssen.
Most famously, Fusion GPS went after Browder on behalf of
Kremlin-affiliated business interests that sought to undo the U.S.
sanctions legislation on Putin allies that Browder spearheaded. If it
seems strange that many of the media figures attacking Trump for his
ostensibly pro-Putin positions have signed up to attack an anti-Putin
activist like Browder, one explanation is that they are longtime
associates of Glenn Simpson and the recipients of Fusion GPS tips and
leaks.
As for Blumenthal, his fierce loyalty
to the Clintons has led him to cross lines in the past, most
notoriously by leading the press campaign to discredit Monica Lewinsky.
During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Blumenthal directed
journalists to investigate Barack Obama’s birth certificate, suggesting
that Hillary Clinton’s opponent was secretly Kenyan—a theme later
picked up by Donald Trump.
With business opportunities presented by
the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, Sidney Blumenthal was in
close touch with Secretary of State Clinton via email.
Associated Press
Participating in the birther narrative was enough to keep Blumenthal
out of Hillary Clinton’s State Department. When the newly appointed
secretary of state wanted to bring him on board, Obama White House
officials nixed it.
But that wasn’t enough to keep Blumenthal at bay. He was drawing a check
from the Clinton Foundation when he started to email Secretary of State
Clinton about the situation in Libya after the United States helped
topple Moammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Blumenthal’s private
intelligence unit included former CIA operative Tyler Drumheller, now
deceased, and Cody Shearer.
According to a New York Times report,
“much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs.
Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was
advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional
government.”
One of the Clinton aides responsible for keeping Blumenthal in check
was Jake Sullivan, an adviser to her 2008 campaign who became her deputy
chief of staff at the State Department and later the department’s
director of policy planning. Blumenthal sent 25 Libya memos to Clinton,
which she frequently forwarded to Sullivan, who then distributed them to
colleagues. “In many cases,” the Times reported, “Mr. Sullivan would
paste the text from the memos into an email and tell the other State
Department officials that they had come from an anonymous ‘contact’ of
Mrs. Clinton.”
So, why did some State Department officials take Blumenthal seriously
when he came forward with Shearer’s memo on Trump and Russia? Why did
Jonathan Winer pass it on to Steele?
Secretary of State John Kerry and Victoria Nuland at the Kremlin in 2016.
Vasily Maximov/Pool Photo via AP
According to his own account, Winer
had known Steele since 2009. They were both working on Russia-related
issues in the private sector. At the outset of Russia’s incursion into
Ukraine and later annexation of Crimea, Steele shared reports he’d
written for an undisclosed private client with Winer. He forwarded them
to other State Department officials, like Assistant Secretary of State
for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. Winer says
that over the course of the two-year crisis, he shared more than 100 of
Steele’s reports on Ukraine and Crimea with his colleagues.
According to Winer, Steele came
forward with the Trump memos in mid-September 2016. Winer took notes and
passed them on to Nuland. Both State Department officials agreed that
Secretary of State John Kerry needed to know what Steele had found.
Although her chronology differed from Winer's, Nuland recalled on CBS’s
“Face the Nation” in February that after seeing the material she
concluded that “this needs to go the FBI.”
Presumably, the House
Intelligence Committee will ask Nuland and Winer to clarify the
timeline. Perhaps that will illuminate the State Department’s role and
whether it helped initiate the probe into the Trump campaign by passing
Steele’s notes to the FBI. The committee may also be curious to know why
former senior government officials played any role in Steele’s
investigation at all.
The standard explanation for Winer and Nuland’s actions is that they trusted Steele. They knew his
work on Ukraine. He was a former intelligence officer from one of
America’s oldest allies, so his information on Trump had to be taken
seriously. The stakes were enormous—a candidate for the highest office
in the land might be compromised by a foreign, often adversarial,
government.
But there’s another way to see it.
The U.S. and U.K. are part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement
known as the “Five Eyes,” which includes the three other major
English-speaking world powers: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The
arrangement is premised on trust. All five members trust each other not
only to share information vital to their national security but also to
not collect intelligence against each other by spying on officials, or
businessmen and each other’s citizens. When former British spy
Christopher Steele brought his memos to Winer, one senior U.S.
intelligence official explained to RCI, “Steele was violating the
fundamental premise of the Five Eyes relationship.”
Jake Sullivan and Hillary Clinton.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Further, even if Winer had no idea who was funding Steele’s work or
that it was opposition research, Steele was a foreign national spying on
a fundamental American political institution, a presidential campaign.
If he had possession of the Shearer memo disclosing that the DNC had
hired Simpson and Fritsch, Winer knew at the very least that there was a
politically funded campaign to find dirt on the Republican candidate—a
campaign that certainly resembled Steele’s research. This appears not to
have bothered Winer, who turned Shearer’s memos over to Steele.
As
with Winer, RCI tried unsuccessfully for comment from Sullivan, a
well-respected foreign policy hand who was in line to become Hillary
Clinton’s White House national security adviser. According to Clinton
campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri,
she and Sullivan took the lead in briefing the press on the
Trump-Russia collusion story, starting in July 2016 at the Democratic
National Convention. After a Slate story
asserted that a Trump organization computer server was communicating
with a Russian bank, Sullivan issued a statement from the campaign under
his own name, claiming, “This could be the most direct link yet between
Donald Trump and Moscow. … This secret hotline may be the key to
unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”What RCI
wanted to ask Sullivan was whether he would have approached the
Trump-Russia collusion story differently had he known of Shearer and
Blumenthal’s involvement.
Glenn R. Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
As for whether the Clinton campaign was aware of the Steele dossier, there is no doubt. A long profile
of Steele in the New Yorker magazine shows that Marc Elias, the lawyer
for the firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the campaign,
“summarized some of the information to top campaign officials, including
the campaign manager Robby Mook.”
If Sullivan was briefed on Steele’s investigation, it surely would’ve
sounded more serious than a Cody Shearer project. Perhaps that was the
point. In fact, that was Glenn Simpson’s innovation. He ran the same
sort of shop Sidney Blumenthal did, and the same sort of campaign. They
were both working on the collusion story. The difference is that
Christopher Steele’s byline gave it the appearance of credibility—even
if it included Cody Shearer’s work.
As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. So what if Blumenthal and
Fusion GPS were both parts of a multi-channel Clintonworld operation to
manufacture evidence against Trump to feed through various channels to
the FBI? It didn’t matter so long as Hillary got elected.
