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The Other Secret Dossier

By Mark Hemingway

State Dept. Official Reportedly Passed On Second Trump ‘Dossier’ Written by One of Clinton’s Most Discreditable Supporters

Last week, the Guardian reported the FBI is looking at a second Trump “dossier,” in addition to the one compiled by former British spook Christopher Steele at the behest of the Clinton campaign. The second dossier is allegedly compiled by Cody Shearer. “One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on [the ‘Shearer dossier’] suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously,” notes the Guardian. “It raises the possibility that parts of the Steele dossier, which has been derided by Trump’s supporters, may have been corroborated by Shearer’s research, or could still be.”

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The Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand is now confirming that a “memo” written by Shearer does exist and she has personally reviewed it. It contains a “a range of allegations concerning the president’s personal behavior and financial transactions.” She does not specify what those allegations are. Bertrand further reports that Jonathan Winer, the Obama State Department’s special envoy to Libya, and former John Kerry aide, was the go-between for Shearer and Steele while he was working at the State Department.

Additionally, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley released a heavily redacted version of the letter making a criminal referral against the author of the original dossier, Christopher Steele. The letter references a “contact” and “friend of the Clintons . . . contemporaneously feeding Steele allegations” about Trump. It is widely assumed that the contact in question is Cody Shearer. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reached out to Grassley for comment and has received no response.

However, it’s worth noting that Shearer is one of the most disreputable characters in Washington, and has been frequently connected to the most scandalous acts of the Clintons’ political careers. If Steele passed on information and/or allegations from Shearer to the FBI, and that information was acted on, it raises serious concerns about the impartiality and judgment of Steele and the FBI.

Shearer was last in the news in 2015, when a bombshell ProPublica report on hacked emails from longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal revealed that the longtime Clinton confidant and aide was running a “secret spy network” network feeding Clinton information on, among other things, Benghazi and Libya while she was secretary of State. Recall that Blumenthal is a known liar and rumormonger so disreputable that the Obama White House put their foot down and nixed her attempt Blumenthal at the State Department.

Even John Podesta says Blumenthal is “lost in his own web of conspiracies.” As it happens, Podesta was one of many Democratic officials that recently received a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee demanding copies of any communications they’ve had with Blumenthal and Shearer, among others.

Along with Blumenthal, the private intelligence network consisted of former CIA agent Tyler Drumheller. Drumheller is another checkered character who was attacked at length for his dishonesty in former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. While Drumheller was being paid by Clinton for intelligence assessments, he was also a consultant for CBS news where sources say Drumheller used his influence to kill a damning 60 Minutes report on her handling of Benghazi. (For more Drumheller see my report on “Hillary’s Spymaster” from the October 19, 2015 edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.)

The third member of the “secret spy network,” was Cody Shearer. Among other things, the three men were trying to leverage their connections to Hillary Clinton when was secretary of State in order to get a lucrative contract in Libya for Osprey Global Solutions, a government contractor that does everything from intelligence assessments to arms dealing. Emails show that Clinton took the advice and assessments of Blumenthal’s crew seriously. It’s further worth noting that Jonathan Winer was appointed the State Department’s Special Envoy for Libya in September of 2013, after Clinton stepped down as secretary of State and his longtime boss John Kerry took over. However, given his position specifically involved overseeing what was going on in Libya, it’s likely he was apprised of what Blumenthal, Shearer, and Drumheller were up to, years before he helped get Shearer’s anti-Trump opposition research to Steele.

The fact that Shearer was involved in all of this should raise alarm bells, but we’re just scratching the surface of what he’s done over the years. This Slate article from 1999 on Shearer is worth reading for all the gory details, but as Slate puts it, he’s so dodgy “If he didn’t exist, the vast right-wing conspiracy would have invented him.” Shearer is closely tied to the Clintons. His brother was an ambassador during Bill Clinton’s presidency—Derek Shearer went so far as to write a letter to Bill Clinton demanding an ambassadorship as a reward for “working behind-the-scenes with Cody and with Sid Blumenthal to promote your candidacy, to defend you and to attack your enemies.” Cody Shearer’s sister is married to Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton administration and a friend of Bill Clinton’s since they were at Oxford together.

For some reason, Shearer keeps popping up at the center of Clinton scandals. The most notorious episode is this one:

In 1998, just before Kathleen Willey—who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton—was to testify in the Paula Jones trial, Willey reportedly had a disturbing encounter where she was approached by a jogger near her home. The complete stranger asked her menacing questions about her children, before Willey blurted out “What do you want? What is it you want to know? Who are you and what do you want to know?” According to Willey, “I’ll never forget that look in his eyes . . . He just looked at me and he said, ‘You’re just not getting the message, are you?'” On Hardball in 1999, MSNBC host Chris Matthews identified the mysterious jogger as Cody Shearer. Journalist Joe Conason—who has a pro-Clinton bias, to put it mildly—later interviewed Shearer, who said he was in San Francisco the day Willey was approached. Shearer provided some details about his stay including bank withdrawals and the place he stayed, including that he by chance ended up sitting next to former Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher—who happens to be his brother-in-law’s former boss—on the flight home. The story took an even weirder turn when Pat Buchanan’s mentally ill brother showed up at his house waving a gun the week after Matthews made his allegation that Shearer had intimidated Willey. Matthews would later apologize for naming Shearer, though he claimed that Willey had been the one who originally identified Shearer.

Shearer was also at the center of the Democrats 1996 fundraising scandal:

During Sen. Fred Thompson’s long, comprehensive, and inconclusive hearings into the Democratic Party’s 1996 campaign fundraising shenanigans . . . Shearer’s name popped up in the course of Sen. Don Nickles’ angry questioning of Terry Lenzner, the private investigator who would later, in the thick of the Jones/Lewinsky/Willey/Who Knows Who Else matter, be accused (by Dick Morris, among others) of coordinating efforts to smear and intimidate those women. Shearer had apparently acted as a liaison between Lenzner’s firm, Investigative Group International, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe. The tribe had donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party, hoping, according to testimony, that the administration would intervene on its behalf in a dispute over drilling rights on tribal land. Lenzner had been retained to uncover compromising links between Nickles—who opposed the tribe’s claims—and local oil interests. Lenzner, while he admitted that he had accepted the tribe’s retainer, has denied that Cody Shearer had ever worked for IGI—though the firm did once employ his sister Brooke.

And there’s two other episodes involving Shearer that seem relevant again:

One, throughout the 1980s, Shearer, whose father was a major gossip columnist, wrote a syndicated column that reported on Senator John Tower’s sexual behavior and alcoholism, sinking his nomination to be Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush. “A conspiracy theorist might infer that in helping to sink Tower, Shearer was already acting as the cat’s paw of a Democratic dirty tricks operation—or, at least, that the Tower affair whetted his appetite for political dirt-digging and skullduggery,” observes Slate. And two, Slate also notes that “it was Shearer who, during the 1992 presidential campaign, introduced the world—through the unlikely medium of Doonesbury—to Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin, you may recall, was the convicted bomber, habitual liar, and all-around sociopath who claimed to have sold drugs to Dan Quayle. Was Shearer acting on behalf of the legendary Clinton ‘opposition research’ outfit, which had floated damaging rumors during the ’92 primaries about Paul Tsongas’ health and Jerry Brown’s drug use? Or was he just an enthusiastic freelancer?” In recent years, Kimberlin has been involved in number of frivolous lawsuits aimed at shutting down conservative blogs.

If the Guardian report is accurate, the FBI had better have a very good answer for why it’s looking at information compiled by the likes of Cody Shearer. And if Steele otherwise incorporated Shearer’s information into his own dossier, it raises even more serious questions about what the FBI knew about the reliability and provenance of Steele’s information.

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