Key words: Jonathan Winer reports "Orbis Business" Ukraine Victoria Nuland

Was Christopher Steele Disseminating Russian Disinformation to the State Department? | Sept. 2018 |

Materials recently turned over to Congress show that while Steele was giving memos to State he also maintained close ties to the billionaire Russian industrialist Oleg V. Deripaska. Some congressional investigators are thus concerned that his memos may have been a channel of Russian disinformation.

Here's how Steele got his work distributed in the halls of Foggy Bottom, according to those who opened the door for him. During "the Ukraine crisis in 2014 and '15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine, what was going on between them," former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland told CBS's Face the Nation in February. "Chris had a friend at the State Department, and he offered us that reporting free, so that we could also benefit from it."

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Winer took some of Steele's Russia memos to Nuland. "She told me they were useful and asked me to continue to send them," Winer wrote. "Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele's reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful."

No one seems to have asked who paid Steele to produce the materials. The memos may have been free for the State Department, but someone was paying Steele to produce them. And as we've since learned--the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee's funding of the Trump dossier being Exhibit A--Steele, like many in the international fraternity of consultants, had no qualms about writing intel in the interest of clients. Would it matter if the person doing the paying for Russia-policy memos was a top Russian oligarch?  

U.S. Congress documents: Russia - Ukraine Crisis Impact of USG Sanctions on Putin

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