The Weird Tales of Jonathan Winer

Whatever the headline, as an effort at self-justification Winer’s effort is an epic fail. Rather than putting to rest questions about the origin and dissemination of the Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, Winer’s account leaves the reader slack-jawed at the remarkable coincidences he cites and the astonishing characters who just happen to turn up in his narrative.

As Winer tells it, he and Steele were old pals. They “met and became friends” in 2009, when both were in the business of selling “business intelligence,” much of it involving Russia. Winer went back to work at State in 2013, after his old Capitol Hill boss, John Kerry, had become secretary of State. But he didn’t lose track of his friend Steele—not at all. He shared, and shared, and shared Steele’s corporate intelligence work with the State Department’s Russia desk. “Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.” (Let’s not speculate about how much it may have been worth to Steele to be able to tell his clients that the materials they were paying for were being regularly consumed by policy-makers in Foggy Bottom.)

Come the summer of 2016, Steele’s prime client was the campaign of Hillary Clinton, by way of the hired-guns at Fusion GPS, for whom he was assembling a grab bag of Trump tales from some sort of Russian sources. Come the fall Steele was spreading dossier info to various news organizations, the FBI, and the State Department. “In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.’” Here’s where it starts getting particularly weird: “I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” Winer writes. “I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with [Winer’s boss at State, Victoria] Nuland.” I doubt I’m the only one who finds this bit of peekaboo passing strange.

To hear Winer tell it, when he gave her his memo, Nuland was all for the State Department doing something about it: She “indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of State needed to be made aware of this material.” Maybe. But to hear Nuland tell it, she recognized the dossier for what it was: “What I did was say that this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of—not the business of the State Department,” Nuland said in an interview with Politico, “and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act, which requires that you stay out of politics. So, my advice to those who were interfacing with [Steele] was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate whether they thought it was credible.”

But according to his piece in the Post, Winer had other people to share the Steele info with, too: “In late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal.” Given Blumenthal’s well-earned reputation as a Clinton hatchet-man, the words “old friend, Sidney Blumenthal” should be telling, if not alarming. So what was the nub of the conversation between these two old friends who just happen to have gotten together in the thick of a presidential campaign? Perhaps they were talking Libya—Blumenthal had been trying for some time to get federal contracts for work in Libya, and Winer was the special envoy to the war-wracked country. But no, they ended up talking about the dossier. You see, it just sort of came up naturally: Blumenthal’s emails had been hacked a few years before, and so “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s report.” You’d think that Sid would have been gob-smacked, astonished at the information sleuthing spook Steele had unearthed. Instead, and ever so matter-of-factly, Blumenthal pulled out a dossier of his own: “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.”

That’s right, Blumenthal had a dossier of his own, compiled by a Clinton crony of decades’ standing, Cody Shearer, and right at the ready. What are the odds?

If this extra dossier is as contrived as it sounds, it wouldn’t be the first time that Shearer peddled fabulous information against a Republican presidential ticket in the waning days of a Clinton campaign. In 1992 Shearer championed the phony story that a poor fellow named Brett Kimberlin was rotting in an Indiana jail, being kept incommunicado so that he couldn’t tell the world about how Vice President Dan Quayle bought marijuana from him back in the 1970s. Yes, Kimberlin was a drug smuggler, and yes, he was indeed in jail—for a string of terroristic bombings in Indianapolis. Shearer was willing to promote the fantastical tales of the “Speedway Bomber” if that helped his friends the Clintons.

Winer seems not to have been at all astonished that two of his old friends—Steele and Blumenthal—themselves unacquainted, should each independently and of their own volition have presented him with the same bombshell material. Winer did not, so far as we know, look around for Allen Funt. No, instead he shared the Shearer memo with Steele, who in turn passed it along to the FBI. Do you think anyone bothered to mention to the Bureau, at the time, the peculiar circumstances and provenance of the notes, most notably that they had come from a source as compromised as Cody Shearer? Well, it never occurred to Winer, because he “did not expect them to be shared with anyone in the U.S. government.”

Right. If this is the best defense Winer can make for himself—carefully composed and edited at his leisure—no wonder he’s grumpy about his conduct being investigated.