Emails: State Department Officials Grappled With How To Handle Christopher Steele’s Intelligence Reports

From The Daily Caller:

Two years before Christopher Steele gained notoriety for the Trump dossier, State Department officials grappled with how to handle the former British spy’s private intelligence reports, which he provided pro bono to officials at Foggy Bottom.

The officials were concerned about security problems with the State Department’s unclassified computer network, and so they came up with a solution, according to emails the Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Jonathan Winer, an aide to former Secretary of State John Kerry and longtime Steele friend, would send the reports from his personal email account to a State Department contractor, the emails show. The contractor, Nina Miller, would then strip identifying information from the documents and send them to a small group of State Department officials on “the high side,” or the agency’s classified network.

“Given our ongoing concerns about security of opennet, [then-State Department official Victoria Nuland] and I wonder if it would be possible for you to flip orbis reports to this system before sending them to us,” Paul Jones, who then served as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs, wrote to Winer on Dec. 8, 2014. Orbis is the name of Steele’s London-based private intelligence firm.

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