Obama State At Center of Anti-Trump Coup Cabal
New Emails Show Obama State Department’s Role in Anti-Trump Coup Cabal
Judicial Watch Investigates Left-wing Assault on Electoral College
Christopher Steele’s Cozy Relationship with the State Department
ISIS Fighter Affirms What JW Exposed Years Ago—Terrorists Enter U.S. Via Mexico
New Emails Show Obama State Department’s Role in Anti-Trump Coup Cabal
John Kerry, President Obama’s secretary of state, seems to be having trouble staying within the legal bounds of the Logan Act, so it’s not surprising that his State Department lieutenants were getting their hands dirty in the conspiracy to bring down Donald Trump.
We now received more evidence of this anti-Trump conspiracy. With The Daily Caller News Foundation, we just released 16 pages of documents revealing senior State Obama officials – Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer – coordinated with incoming House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor, Daniel Silverberg, to work on Russia dossier information provided by Christopher Steele.
Steele was surreptitiously paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to create the infamous anti-Trump dossier used to justify a series of FISA spy warrants targeting Carter Page. Winer is a former Obama State Department deputy assistant secretary who was implicated in working with Steele and Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal to circulate the anti-Trump dossier.
We obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf of ourselves and The Daily Caller News Foundation against the State Department after it failed to respond to three separate FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv- 00968)). The lawsuit seeks:
- All records of communications between State Department officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the one hand, and British National Christopher Steele and/or employees or contractors of Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, on the other hand.
- All records and/or memoranda provided by Christopher Steele and/or his firm Orbis Business Intelligence or by others acting on Steele’s/Orbis’s behalf, to State Department officials.
- Any and all records in the custody of the State Department related to the provision of documents to British national Christopher Steele and/or his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, or the receipt of documents from Steele or his firm. Time period is January 20, 2009 through the present.
- All records created in 2016 by Jonathan M. Winer relating to research compiled by Christopher Steele.
Here is some of what we learned from these documents.
In an email exchange on September 19, 2016, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS asks Winer if he is “in town?” Winer replies “For a couple of hours.”
In an email exchange on September 26, 2016, Winer emails Nuland asking for “15 minutes of your time today if possible,” to discuss a “Russia related issue” from his “old O [Orbis Business Intelligence] friend.” Orbis was co-founded and run by Russia dossier author Christopher Steele. Nuland’s assistant suggests a secure call for the discussion and Winer asks his aide to postpone a meeting he was to have with the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to accommodate.
In an exchange beginning in November 2016, Hoyer top-aide Silverberg emails a “thank you” to Nuland, calling her a “warrior on these issues” and stating that he looks forward to pursuing “some of the things we discussed yesterday, albeit on the system integrity side.” Nuland forwards this email to Winer who adds that he wants to talk about “some new info.”
From: Silverberg, Daniel [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 10:57 PM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Subject: Thank you
Toria,
It was a delight to speak today, notwithstanding the context. You’ve been a warrior on these issues, and I look forward to speaking further to preserve and wherever possible strengthen the important work you have done. I’ll follow up regarding a possible working group meeting.
On Nov 29, 2016, at 10:07 AM, Nuland, Victoria J <[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks, Daniel. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in whatever capacity life brings. Copied here is Jonathan Winer, who has some legal ideas that may be of interest to you and Cong. Hoyer.
From: Nuland, Victoria J
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:08 AM
To: Winer, Jonathan
Subject: RN: Thank you
They want to pursue some of the things we discussed yesterday, albeit on the system integrity side.
From: Winer, Jonathan
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:12 AM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Subject: Re: Thank you
Want to talk briefly further. Some new info want you to be aware of. [Redacted] Phone call ok sometime this am? Five minutes is enough.
From: Nuland, Victoria J <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:23 AM
To: Winer, Jonathan <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Thank you
Of course, [redacted] Send me good number and time.
From: Silverberg, Daniel
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:52 AM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Cc: Winer, Jonathan
Subject: Re: Thank you
Great. Jonathan, I am all ears.
From: Winer, Jonathan
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2016 2:10 PM
To: Silverberg, Daniel <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Thank you
I’ve reached out per our call yesterday. Please call me to talk further at your early convenience. Weekend best but can also talk Monday.
In a November 2016 exchange with the subject line “Would like to catch up on something at your convenience,” Winer reaches out to Nuland for a meeting, which gets booked in the Truman building on November 28.
In an email exchange dated December 12, 2016, Winer requests a brief meeting with Nuland saying, “Something new has come up of which I want you to be aware.” Nuland replies, “Ok,” and adds her assistant to the exchange. Winer’s assistant then emails Nuland’s assistant looking for a time to meet.
In February 2018, Winer wrote an op-ed claiming anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal approached him with separate dossiers. Winer wrote: “In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.” Also, “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know …”
Christopher Bedford, editor in chief of The Daily Caller News Foundation, had this to say about these documents: “Every day of digging reveals more and more political collaboration on this hit job, and at the highest levels. While so much of the media is content to chase Russian conspiracies, The Daily Caller News Foundation and the fantastic lawyers at Judicial Watch are going to keep doing the hard work of holding power accountable.”
Here’s what else we’re pursuing in this area:
We recently released 43 pages of documents from the State Department revealing that its “Special Coordinator for Libya,” Jonathan Winer, played a key role in facilitating Steele’s access to other top government officials, prominent international business executives. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.
We previously released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).
We are also suing the State Department for communications between Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.
These new documents further confirm that the Obama State Department was a way station for Steele’s smear dossier and other anti-Trump activism.
Judicial Watch Investigates Left-wing Assault on Electoral College
The organized Left has invested much recently in “reforming” the Electoral College, established by the U.S. Constitution. Judicial Watch, again, is manning the wall against this assault on our election system.
We just filed a Colorado Open Records Act lawsuit on behalf of reporter Todd Shepherd against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold for records of communications related to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (Todd Shepherd v Jena Griswold in her official capacity as Colorado Secretary of State (No. 2019-cv-032310))
This “compact” would award Colorado’s presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of whether Colorado’s voters chose that candidate.
We sued after Griswold refused to turn over certain documents in response to a February 4, 2019, open records request for records about the Electoral College debate.
On February 21, 2019, the Colorado House passed a National Popular Vote bill and sent it to Governor Jared Polis. Colorado Secretary of State Griswold is a critic of the Electoral College and applauded Gov. Polis’s signing of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact legislation.
Currently, most states award all their Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. But, as described here by the National Conference of State Legislatures, when a state, such as Colorado, “passes legislation to join the National Popular Vote Compact, it pledges that all of that state’s electoral votes will be given to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote nationwide, rather than the candidate who won the vote in just that state. These bills will take effect only when states with a majority of the electoral votes have passed similar legislation and joined the compact.”
Five times a presidential candidate has won the “popular vote” but lost the election, most recently Hillary Clinton. Many opponents of President Trump have proposed undoing the Electoral College. Supporters of the Electoral College point out that it balances the interests of citizens in both large and small states by requiring candidates to seek votes in less populous states whose interests might otherwise be ignored. In addition, under the reform, a state could award its Electoral College votes to a presidential candidate who lost the state’s popular vote.
Leftists in Colorado and other states want to undo the Electoral College and the U.S. Constitution in the hopes of guaranteeing control of the presidency. This attack on the Electoral College would give large left-leaning states and the perpetrators of voter fraud an unconstitutionally outsized impact on the outcome of our presidential elections.
This emerging threat to free and fair election is on your Judicial Watch’s radar screen and you can be sure this lawsuit is the just the beginning of our educational efforts to alert Americans about this important policy challenge.
Christopher Steele’s Cozy Relationship with the State Department
The case of Obama State Department official Jonathan Winer just gets curiouser and curiouser (see our lead story above). He was President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry’s point man on Libya, but it seems he was freelancing in another area.
We released 43 pages of documents revealing that Winer played a key role in facilitating dossier author Christopher Steele’s access to other top government officials and prominent international business executives. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.
We obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf of The Daily Caller News Foundation against the State Department after it failed to respond to three separate FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv- 00968)).
In an email on December 11, 2014, Winer places pressure on his colleague Nina Miller to assist Steele by getting “O Reports” [likely Orbis] to Toria [Victoria] Nuland and Paul Jones ASAP.” Nuland at the time was the State Department Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs; Jones the European and Eurasian Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary.
From: Winer, Jonathan
Sent: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 17:41:32 +0000
To: Miller, Nina A
Subject: Please get “O Reports” to Toria Nuland and Paul Jones ASAP – they are time [sp]
I know you have other burdens, but this one needs to get done if you can as soon as possible.
In a series of emails on November 20, 2014, Winer openly acts as a liaison for Steele, attempting to set up meetings for “Chris” and referencing “Three Orbis Reports” in the subject line of the email. This meeting was scheduled to be with Marialuisa Fotheringham, office manager to the principal deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs and, again, Paul W. Jones.
In a series of emails on November 20, 2014, Winer negotiates a time with Ariuna Namsrai, APCO Worldwide’s senior director and managing director for Russia, CIS and Central Asia for her to meet Christopher Steele at “lunch or dinner.” APCO bills itself as one of the world’s leading advisory and advocacy communications consultancies.
In a series of emails on January 13-14, 2015, with the subject line “Morocco immediate need,” Winer introduces Steele to Marc Ginsberg, former Ambassador to Morocco under Bill Clinton, former APCO Worldwide Senior Vice President and Managing Director and former CEO of One Voice Movement Foundation.
Weiner writes to Ginsberg: “Marc, Chris Steele is a friend of mine who has a very, very high end business intelligence service based in London. He formerly worked for the UK government.”
Ginsberg replies to Winer: “I spoke to Chris… complicated!”
In an email on April 13, 2015, to Steele and his partner Chris Burrows titled “Request for contacts with WB and IMF” Winer appears to ask Steele and Burrows to act unofficially on behalf of the United States with World Bank and the International Monetary Fund:
Winer writes: Chris and Chris, advice is that you brief the country team…. it would be best that this not come in from or through any US official, but be a straight-on request from you in light of impact on Mongolia and there [sic] need to know.”
On July 13, 2015, while trying to schedule a dinner in London with Steele, Winer discloses to Steele from an unsecure BlackBerry that he is scheduled to have a Secure Video Teleconference Call [SVTC] with “higher ranked people than I am at the NSC.” Steele later confirms their dinner appointment, and says, “I shall wait for you on the park bench in the main square facing the front of the embassy building.”
In an email exchange on November 20, 2014, Winer attempts to introduce Steele to Nelson Cunningham, President of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm co-founded by former Clinton White House Counselor Thomas ‘Mack’ McLarty. In the email to Nelson, Winer describes Steele as “An old friend of mine,” and “a former senior British intelligence officer focusing on former Soviet Union with a number of US and European private sector clients these days…”
In an email on January 12, 2017, Hollywood producer Eric Hamburg forwards an article about the Steele dossier to Winer, asking him if he would be interested in working on a movie about it:
“Dear Jonathan, I have been meaning to write to you, and just came across this article which mentions your name… Let’s do a movie about this!
I was wondering if you have decided what your next position will be after leaving government. I’d like to keep in touch and get together next time I’m in Washington. I’m currently working on a mini-series about Watergate for ABC with John Dean.
Assessing this new information, Daily Caller News Foundation President Neil Patel said: “It’s amazing how hard our government tries to keep the truth from the American people. Thankfully, with Judicial Watch filing a lawsuit on our behalf, we have been able to uncover phony dossier author Christopher Steele’s previously hidden contacts with the Obama State Department. These guys at Judicial Watch are bulldogs and we can’t thank them enough.”
Let there be no doubt: Fusion GPS and Clinton spy Christopher Steele had a close relationship with the Obama State Department. The State Department under John Kerry is emerging as another center of the Spygate conspiracy against President Trump.
Perhaps Hollywood would like to do a movie about that.
ISIS Fighter Affirms What JW Exposed Years Ago—Terrorists Enter U.S. Via Mexico
No one has done more to expose the dangers created by our unsecure border than your Judicial Watch. Recent news confirms Judicial Watch early warnings about the national security threat at the border were on the money. As our latest Corruption Chronicles blog confirms:
Five years after a Judicial Watch investigation uncovered evidence of Islamic terrorists infiltrating the United States through Mexico, a captured ISIS fighter is providing details of a plot in which jihadists enter the country through the southern border to carry out an attack. The terrorists begin their journey in Central America and exploit vulnerabilities in the Mexican border to reach the U.S., according to Abu Henricki, an ISIS soldier captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces in Rojava, Syria. Henricki and 160 of his fellow terrorists were interviewed at length by a research group called the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. The nonpartisan organization published its findings recently in an alarming report that includes a video of the interview with the captured terrorist, who is Canadian and has dual Trinidadian citizenship
“They were going to move me to the Mexican side [of the U.S. southern border] via Puerto Rico,” Henricki says about the ISIS plot. “This was mastermind[ed] by a guy in America. Where he is, I do not know. That information, the plan came from someone from the New Jersey state from America. I was going to take a boat [from Puerto Rico] into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,” Henricki explains. “I don’t know where I’d end up.” In the report, the researchers reveal that the ISIS fighters were to travel from Syria to penetrate the U.S. southern order by infiltrating migration routes. “Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s heightened rhetoric about the U.S.- Mexico border and his many claims that it is vulnerable to terrorists, ISIS apparently also thought so, as knowledge of this ISIS plot came from the mouth of a now-repentant ISIS cadre,” the report states.
Judicial Watch has reported this for years as part of an ongoing investigation into the national security crisis created by the dangerously porous southern border. Judicial Watch has interviewed local, state and federal law enforcement officials as well as U.S. and Mexican military sources and has traveled to remote Mexican border towns to interview American ranchers. When the Central American caravan got started last fall, Judicial Watch deployed an investigative team to the Guatemala-Honduras border after Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales confirmed that nearly 100 Isis terrorists had been apprehended in the impoverished Central American nation. Judicial Watch’s reporting has confirmed that ISIS has a training cell just a few miles from El Paso, Texas in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. We also verified that Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links to stash areas in a rural Texas town (Acala) near El Paso. Back in 2014 Judicial Watch reported that four ISIS soldiers, who entered the U.S. through the Mexican border, were arrested in McAllen and Pharr Texas.
Two years ago, Judicial Watch exposed a plot involving Mexican drug traffickers that help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and at the time lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided to Judicial Watch by high-ranking Homeland Security officials. Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by Judicial Watch’s sources reveals.
The U.S. government—under both Republican and Democrat administrations—has long possessed intelligence indicating that Islamic terrorists exploit the southern border. In fact, Judicial Watch uncovered State Department records confirming that, for more than a decade, the government has known that “Arab extremists” are entering the country through Mexico with the assistance of smuggling network “cells.” Among them was a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the FBI. Some Mexican smuggling networks actually specialize in providing logistical support for Arab individuals attempting to enter the United States, the government documents obtained by Judicial Watch say. The top Al Qaeda leader in Mexico was identified in the September 2004 cable from the American consulate in Ciudad Juárez as Adnan G. El Shurkrjumah. The cable was released to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act.
Just last year a Jordanian man was arrested by federal authorities for smuggling six citizens of Yemen—an Al Qaeda hotbed—into the U.S. through Mexico. The smuggler, 31-year-old Moayad Heider Mohammad Aldairi, conspired with others to sneak the six Yemeni nationals across the Texas border for a fee, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) statement. Weeks later a group of migrants from a terrorist nation managed to infiltrate the U.S. through Mexico, though the Border Patrol subsequently apprehended the men. All were from Bangladesh, a south Asian Islamic country that’s well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). Earlier in the year, Judicial Watch had reported on the epidemic of Bangladeshi nationals getting smuggled into the country via the porous southern border, especially through Texas.
Until next week …
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