Former Obama official confirms Steele dossier was given to US government

An official at former US President Barack Obama’s State Department has confirmed a report by Republicans that the explosive dossier on President Donald Trump’s alleged links with Russia was given to him via a former MI6 spy and an aide to the then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In an op-ed published by the Washington Post on Thursday, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Jonathan Winer said that  former British spy Christopher Steele and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal had approached him in September of 2016 with separate dossiers claiming malfeasance between Trump and the Kremlin.

“Steele’s sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign,” Winer said.

Winer added that he had made a summary of the intelligence reports at the time to share with former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who notified then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

“I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department. 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,” he noted.

Describing Blumenthal as “an old friend,” Winer said she showed him at a meeting “notes” put together by another longtime Clinton operative, Cody Shearer, that “echoed” the claims made in the Steele dossier.

Winer said he shared the information from the Clinton operatives with Steele “to ask for his professional reaction,” but he never thought the former British spy would share it with anyone else in the government.

“But I learned later that Steele did share them — with the FBI, after the FBI asked him to provide everything he had on allegations relating to Trump, his campaign and Russian interference in US elections,” Winer stressed.

PressTV-Did UK intelligence meddle in 2016 US election?

It looks like British intelligence colluded with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 in an attempt to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the president, Philip Giraldi says.

“I am in no position to judge the accuracy of the information generated by Steele or Shearer,” he said. “But I was alarmed at Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and so were US intelligence and law enforcement officials. I believe all Americans should be alarmed — and united in the search for the truth about Russian interference in our democracy, and whether Trump and his campaign had any part in it.”

Republican lawmakers in Congress say the Justice Department actively sought to undermine Trump and help the election campaign of Clinton.

US intelligence agencies claim Russia-linked hackers provided WikiLeaks with damaging information -- in the form of thousands of hacked emails -- about Clinton to skew the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump.

Trump has repeatedly denied allegations that his campaign colluded with Russians and has condemned the investigations. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also denied the allegations.

Meanwhile, former US President George W Bush claimed on Thursday that there was “clear evidence” regarding the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

“There’s pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled,” Bush said at a conference in the United Arab Emirates. “Whether they affected the outcome is another question.”

“It’s problematic that a foreign nation is involved in our election system. Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results,” he added.

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