=•Ex-State Department Official ‘Destroyed’ Records At Request Of Christopher Steele==

A former State Department official destroyed reports he received from former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a Senate report released on Tuesday.

Jonathan Winer, who was Steele’s point of contact at the State Department, said that Steele asked him to destroy the records in January 2017, the same month that the Trump dossier became public.

The Senate report also says that Winer initially denied that he arranged a meeting in October 2016 for Steele at the State Department. Winer corrected his statement in a follow-up interview after he was shown State Department visitor logs.

A former State Department official told the Senate Intelligence Committee he destroyed records in January 2017 at the request of former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Jonathan Winer, who served as special envoy to Libya through early 2017, was Steele’s contact at the State Department. He arranged a meeting for Steele in October 2016 with another State Department official at Foggy Bottom to share findings from a dossier of research he had compiled on Donald Trump.

The Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed Winer twice about his contacts with Steele and his handling of the dossier, on July 10, 2017 and April 18, 2018.

According to the Senate report, Winer disclosed that he destroyed reports that Steele had sent him over the years. The Senate report also says that Winer failed to reveal when asked in his first interview with the committee that he had arranged the meeting for Steele at the State Department months earlier.

“After Steele’s memos were published in the press in January 2017, Steele asked Winer to make note of having them, then either destroy all the earlier reports Steele had sent the Department of State or return them to Steele, out of concern that someone would be able to reconstruct his source network,” the Senate report says. (RELATED: Senate Intel Panel Finds No Evidence Of Trump-Russia Collusion)

The report quotes Winer saying: “So I destroyed them, and I basically destroyed all the correspondence I had with him.”

Steele appeared to be on a deletion spree at the time he made his request that Winer scrub his records.

The former MI6 officer told a British court in March that he “wiped” all of his correspondence related to the dossier in December 2016 and January 2017. He said he had no records of communications with his primary dossier source, who has been identified as Igor Danchenko.

Steele, a former MI6 officer who owns a private intelligence firm in London, provided Winer with more than 100 intelligence reports from 2014 through 2016.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/19/christopher-steele-dossier-state-department-jonathan-winer-russia-senate-report/

Study: 12 Percent of Voters in Virginia Could Be Registered Illegally

Alana GoodmanAugust 20, 2020 11:01 AM

Policy

Findings could lead to changes in voting laws

Up to 12 percent of registered voters in Virginia could be on the rolls illegally, according to a new white paper circulating among officials at the Department of Justice's front office and members of Congress.

Using data from one Virginia county's jury pools, which are largely drawn from voter registration rolls, the study conducted by the National Election Integrity Task Force, found that 3 percent of the prospective jury pool—a total of 12,917 people—were ineligible to serve due to self-reporting as non-citizens, who are not allowed to vote under federal law. One percent self-reported as convicted felons, who are also ineligible to vote. An additional 2 percent were "likely unlawful participants due to self-reporting as non-English speaking," and another 6 percent "are worthy of further investigation due to the undeliverability, and non-response, to the solicitation for jury duty, which is a crime in Virginia."

Taken together and extrapolating the data, the authors estimate up to 12 percent of voters in the entire state of Virginia could be registered illegally. "At this point in time, the entire Virginia voting roll should be considered untrustworthy and invalid," the paper argues.

The study calls for a federal audit of the Virginia voter registration rolls and Department of Justice enforcement of voter ID laws on a state level. It comes at a time when President Donald Trump and administration officials have been raising alarms about illegal ballot activity in the 2020 election. Earlier this month, Trump said he would oppose a funding increase for the U.S. Postal Service due to concerns about fraud in universal mail-in voting.

Attorney General William Barr's chief of staff's office and seven Republican members of Congress have been briefed on the findings, which has prompted "executive and legislative branch discussions," according to the NEITF.

One of the study's authors, John Mills, a former Department of Defense director for cybersecurity policy, said the study's findings indicate that there are ineligible voters who have been registered to vote in the state.

"The point of fraud is at registration, so once you're registered you're in the system," said Mills.

The NEITF is a group of former national security officials, public officials and attorneys that was founded by Mills last year to investigate voter fraud in Virginia and other states. Members include former acting secretary of the Air Force Tidal W. "Ty" McCoy, former New Jersey mayor Mario Kranjac and former Virginia prosecutor Tim Griffin.

The data in the white paper were based on background questionnaires filled out by prospective jurors in Virginia's 31st circuit court, which covers Prince William County on the border of Washington, D.C. The jury pool is largely drawn from county voter registration rolls, although the circuit court said it also uses data from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

Until Monday, the circuit court's website said jurors were "randomly selected from the Voter Registration Lists" in the county. When contacted by the Washington Free Beacon, the circuit court's elected Democratic clerk Jacqueline C. Smith said she instituted a new policy in 2017 and now uses both voting registration rolls and DMV records to select jurors. Smith updated the website to reflect this change on Monday.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/study-12-percent-of-voters-in-virginia-could-be-registered-illegally/