Court docs: Steele
also passed dossier info to Clinton crony Strobe Talbott
Strobe Talbott. YouTube, Brookings Inst. video
By Daily Caller News Foundation December 12, 2018
By Chuck Ross
·
Christopher Steele disclosed information from
his infamous dossier to Strobe Talbott, a longtime Clinton insider and former
State Department official.
·
Court documents released on Tuesday show that
Steele shared information with Talbott because of the latter’s position on the
State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
·
Talbott’s link to the dossier has not been
previously reported. His brother-in-law, another Clinton insider, compiled an
anti-Trump dossier of his own during the campaign.
Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous anti-Trump
dossier, disclosed information from his Trump-Russia investigation to a
longtime Clinton crony because of his position on a State Department advisory
board, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.
According to the court filing,
Steele told a court in the United Kingdom on Aug. 1 that he provided Strobe
Talbott, the Clinton insider, with anti-Trump research because of his position
on the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an independent advisory board set up in
2011 by then-Sec. of State Hillary Clinton.
Clinton appointed Talbott chairman of the advisory board,
and he served in that role through John Kerry’s tenure.
“As regards disclosure to Strobe Talbott (if relevant to
this claim), the Defendant relies on US Department of State Foreign Affairs
Policy Board,” reads the Aug. 1 filing.
Steele’s link to Talbott, which has not previously been
revealed, shows the lengths to which Steele went to disseminate the fruits of
his Trump investigation, which started in June 2016 when he was hired by Fusion
GPS, an opposition research firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign.
The Steele document was revealed on Tuesday in a lawsuit
filed by three Russian bankers who have sued Steele in the U.K. and U.S. over
the dossier. A Sept. 14, 2016 memo in the dossier alleges links between the
founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, and the Kremlin. They have sued Steele and
Fusion GPS for defamation.
Steele disclosed the link to Talbott in response to a
series of questions posed in the U.K. ligation.
Steele’s filing does not provide additional details on his
interactions with Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Bill
Clinton administration.
Talbott has long been friends with the Clintons, having
met the former president at Oxford in the 1960s.
It is also unclear what information from the dossier
Steele gave to Talbott, or when the handoff would have occurred. (RELATED: Comey:
Dossier Was Unverified Before And After FBI Used It To Obtain Spy Warrants)
Steele, a former MI6 officer, compiled 17 memos dated
from June 20, 2016 to Dec. 13, 2016, alleging a vast conspiracy between the
Trump team and Kremlin to influence the 2016 election. The FBI would rely
heavily on the dossier to obtain four warrants to spy on Carter Page,
a former Trump campaign adviser who is named throughout the dossier.
Page has vehemently denied Steele’s claims. Republicans
have accused the FBI of abusing the surveillance court process by relying on
the dossier, which FBI officials have acknowledged was largely unverified when
it was used to obtain spy warrants on Page.
Steele disseminated his dossier widely, to his contacts
at the FBI, numerous news organizations, Congress, and the State Department. By
passing the dossier to Talbott, who then served as president of the Brookings
Institution, Steele pushed the anti-Trump research to the president of the most
prominent think tank in the U.S.
Steele had other ties to the State Department beyond
Talbott.
In Summer 2016, the retired spy met provided his longtime
friend, Jonathan Winer,
then the State Department’s special envoy to Libya, with parts of the dossier.
Winer passed a summary of Steele’s claims to others in the State Department.
Steele also visited State Department
headquarters in October 2016 to brief officials on the
dossier. It is unclear whether Talbott was involved in the meeting, which
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr revealed during a hearing
on June 20.
Talbott also has a familial link to another dossier that
was handled by
Steele and Winer. Talbott’s brother-in-law is Cody Shearer,
a longtime Clinton fixer who conducted a private investigation of his own into
Trump during the campaign.
Shearer’s dossier contains some allegations similar to
Steele’s report, including that Russians had blackmail material on Trump.
Shearer passed his report to Winer through Sidney Blumenthal, another longtime
Clinton insider. Winer then shared the Shearer memos with Steele, who provided
them to the FBI. (RELATED:
Clinton Fixer’s ‘Second Dossier’ Was Met With Skepticism)
A person who spoke with Shearer in Summer 2016 about his
findings told The Daily Caller News Foundation that it seemed to be a
“rope-a-dope” scheme being pushed by purported Russian spies.
Talbott did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers
for Steele and the Alfa Bank founders also did not respond to a request for
comment.
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