Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland made a bombshell admission Wednesday at an otherwise quiet hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She admitted that during the waning days of the 2016 election, the Obama State Department hosted ex-British-spy Christopher Steele to give a secret briefing to select staff on his anti-Trump dossier.
This was not information that had been offered up voluntarily by any of Steele’s friends at the State Department. For example, it seems likely that then-special envoy Jonathan Winer knew about the Steele briefing that has now been revealed. And yet when he penned a self-justificatory op-ed in the Washington Post about his Steele ties, any mention of the briefing is strangely missing. Winer admitted to meeting one-on-one with Steele to see the dossier; he admitted to writing up a two-page condensed version of Steele’s opus and giving it to Nuland; he admitted to meeting his old friend (and Clinton crony) Sidney Blumenthal who showed him dossier-like materials from notorious Clinton crank Cody Shearer. And yet, though he was the man in the middle of dossier activities at State, Winer never mentioned that his pal Steele made it to Foggy Bottom—in person—to tell his dossier tales.
The revelation that there was a dossier briefing comes thanks to serious investigative work by chairman Richard Burr’s committee staff and thanks, as well, to smart questioning by the senator. “Based upon our review of the visitor logs at the State Department, Mr. Steele visited the State Department, briefing officials on the dossier in October of 2016,” Burr said. Then he asked Nuland: “Did you have any role in that briefing?” (Note that Burr did not ask whether there was a briefing, he built the existence of the briefing into the structure of the question, leaving Nuland no room to deny it.)
What she did deny was participating in the briefing—but she had trouble keeping her story straight. Asked if she had any role, Nuland told the committee “I did not. I actively chose not to be part of that briefing.”
“But you were aware of the briefing,” Burr pressed.
“I was not aware of it until afterwards,” Nuland claimed.
So, let’s see if we can sort this out: Nuland claims she actively chose not to be part of a briefing that she was not aware of until after it had happened. How is that possible?
Her answers may not be logically consistent, but she is consistent about one thing about—an ongoing effort to put as much distance as she can between herself and the dossier.
Winer placed her right in the thick of things: Having written his two-page summary of Steele’s dossier, Winer wrote he “shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”
That isn’t how Nuland recounted her conversation with Winer when interviewed by Politico’s Susan Glasser in February. She said that, having heard about the dossier sometime late in July, “What I did was say that this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of—not the business of the State Department, 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 him was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate whether they thought it was credible.”
Very upright indeed. Except if she thought dabbling in Steele’s information was a violation of the Hatch Act, what could she possibly have thought of Steele himself presenting that information to State Department officials in State Department offices on State Department time? Wouldn’t that amount to a large-scale violation of the Hatch Act? And knowing that, wouldn’t she be obliged to do more than merely choose “not to be part of that briefing.”
Oh, I’m sorry, that’s right: Nuland “was not aware of it until afterwards.”
We know now that State Department officials took a briefing from Christopher Steele in October 2016. The next thing to find out is exactly who attended that briefing, and what they did with the fanciful stories they were being told.
