Judicial Watch: Emails Show Dossier-Connected Top Obama State Department Officials Set ‘Face-to-Face’ Meeting on ‘Russian Matter’ in NY in September 2016
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch and The Daily Caller News Foundation today released
84 pages of documents, including a September 2016 email exchange between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, a close associate of dossier author Christopher Steele, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”
(In
June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the
Steele dossier by July 2016.)
According to an op-ed Winer wrote for
The Washington Post in 2018, also in September 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the “dossier… I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch also show that State Department officials continued to use unsecure BlackBerry devices for the transmission of classified material more than a year after Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system was revealed.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf of itself 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.