Book: The FBI-Steele Partnership Was Started by, Plot Twist, an Obama Aide

Alert the Washington Consensus.

When Steele asked his FBI handler to come see him in London to hear the wild and crazy things his paid cut-outs were hearing from their paid sources in Russia, the handler needed a go-ahead from someone in State.

Enter Victoria Nuland.

Says Russian Roulette, "There were a few hoops Gaeta had to jump through. He was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome. The FBI checked with Victoria Nuland's office at the State Department: Do you support this meeting? Nuland, having found Steele's reports on Ukraine to have been generally credible, gave the green light."

...

Ms. Nuland's name surfaced earlier this year as Senate investigators under Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican, turned up evidence that Mr. Steele met with another Obama State official, Jonathan Winer.

He worked as a middleman to bring Mr. Steele together with Sidney Blumenthal, a fierce Hillary Clinton defender. Mr. Winer spoke with Ms. Nuland, who gave a heads up to Secretary of State John Kerry.

If Victoria Nuland sounds familiar, it might because she straight-up lied to James Rosen when he asked if the US was engaged in bilateral negotiations with Iran in 2013. The State Department then deleted that lie from the official video record of the presser, in order to erase it from reality.

The saga began in 2013, when then-spokeswoman Victoria Nuland blatantly lied to Fox News correspondent James Rosen that the U.S. was not engaged in bilateral talks with Iran. This was revealed to be false. Asked in December of that year if lying was necessary to achieve policy goals, Psaki told Rosen that diplomacy needed "privacy" to progress at times, appearing to acknowledge that Nuland had lied earlier.

Last month, Rosen revealed the clip of that exchange with Psaki had been excised from the public record. Initially, the State Department blamed it on a "glitch," but spokesman John Kirby admitted Wednesday that in fact it was an intentional deletion, although he said he couldn't say who had ordered the deletion. Psaki denied having anything to do with it.

So let's just say while she's not credible, she's reliable, at least as an apparatchik for her masters.

posted by Ace at 05:42 PM

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