According to The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who just released a four-page memo attempting to discredit part of the Russia investigation, will now turn his attention to a second document handled by Jonathan Winer, longtime John Kerry aide and former special envoy to Libya under President Obama.
Winer received a memorandum from political activist Cody Shearer and passed it along to Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official who had compiled his own dossier on Donald Trump.
(...)
The Washington Examiner's Byron York reported last month that congressional investigators were “looking into a possible Obama State Department role in the collection and dissemination” of the dossier compiled by Steele, who gave his preliminary findings to the FBI in the summer of 2016.
Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote a letter to the Justice Department, a heavily redacted version of which they released Monday, explaining why they recommended the DOJ open a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele.
Bertrand reports
... the redacted portions of the letter refer to the information compiled by Shearer—for the first time revealing some of the key details that were redacted in the original letter. Shearer’s information was passed to Steele by Winer. Winer, a friend of Steele’s, was then serving as the special envoy for Libya, and had previously passed Steele’s Russia and Ukraine reports along to the State Department’s Europe bureau between 2014 and 2016.
Senators Grassley and Graham express concern that Clinton allies were giving information to Steele.
Mr. Steele's memorandum states that his company ‘received this report from [redacted] US State Department,’ that the report was the 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 allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.
But Bertrand says the 'memorandum' in question is not actually a memo.
According to a source familiar with the matter, however, Steele’s “memorandum” was actually a handwritten note on a copy of Shearer’s report that outlined its origin—the “foreign sub-source” who had been in touch with Shearer. The note identified Shearer as a contact of Sidney Blumenthal’s, a longtime associate of the Clintons. It also explained that Steele had obtained the document via Winer, who had gotten it from Shearer.
Steele had written the note on the Shearer report while in Rome in October of 2016, while en route to meet an FBI contact there. It is not clear how or why Winer obtained the report from Shearer.
A separate congressional source confirmed to me that Winer and Shearer “will both be a part” of Nunes’s impending tussle with the State Department.
Devin Nunes's Next Target (The Atlantic)
Referral of Christopher Steele for Potential Violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (pdf)
Grassley, Graham release copy of request for criminal probe of dossier author (Politico)