State Dept Officials Said Steele Reports ‘Do Not Ring True,’ ‘Flaky’ And ‘Extreme’

Not only has former British spy Christopher Steele’s memo about President Trump colluding with Russia been debunked, but we now know many of his reports years prior lacked credibility. In essence, Steele never should have been chosen to investigate anything; but he was a Clinton pal.

The State Department has handed over dozens of documents as part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch on behalf of The Daily Caller News Foundation in April of 2018. Emails received show “State Department officials cast doubt on the credibility of several intelligence memos that former British spy Christopher Steele provided the agency in the years before he began investigating Donald Trump” reported Daily Caller.

One State Department official who served as an ambassador to Ukraine said Steele’s reporting was “flaky.” Another official called one of Steele’s reports “extreme” sounding, and mentioned that many of Steele’s reports “do not ring true.”

It’s no wonder that the Steele dossier was so easily debunked, particularly if he has a past of shaky intel work. However, notes the Daily Caller, “despite the potential red flags regarding Steele’s work, the ex-M16 officer was granted a meeting at Foggy Bottom in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.”

“During the meeting, Steele shared details later found in a dossier that accused the Trump campaign of conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the election.” Also included in the information released through the lawsuit, shows Steele, who was based in London, “had reportedly shared more than 100 intelligence reports about Russia and Ukraine from 2014 to 2016 with Jonathan Winer, who then served as the State Department’s special envoy to Libya.”

Jonathan Winer was a longtime aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Steele passed over 100 reports to Winer, who then passed Steele’s memos to “a small group of State Department officials, including Victor Nuland, Paul Jones, and Geoffrey Pyatt” according to the documents. After receiving Steele’s reports, “the email traffic indicates that the officials increasingly spotted problems in the reports.”

Nuland once responded to a report about political instability in Ukraine, writing, “some of this rings true, some not.” Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, responded in a 2015 email, “so I would put this in the same category as their other flaky reports.” DCNF President Neil Patel said, “it is becoming clearer that there were unprecedented levels of collusion between Obama administration officials and outside partisans in an effort to harm Trump, even though some government officials recognized that Christopher Steele’s intel was questionable, at best.”