Second Trump-Russia dossier was crafted by trusted Clinton operative

A Clinton family operative succeeded in getting federal agents to review his own “Trump-Russia” dossier, which implicates the president on a number of unproven charges.

The Guardian reported Tuesday that Cody Shearer provided a second dossier to the FBI in October 2016 and that it was shared with multiple media outlets prior to the election. The FBI is currently assessing the Shearer dossier, according to the report. This revelation came as a shock to even Vox.com, which admitted that Shearer has no real “experience in intelligence.”

In its report, The Guardian attempts to disconnect Shearer from Hillary Clinton, labeling him a “journalist” and claiming that “there is no evidence that the Clinton campaign was aware of the Shearer memo.”

But plenty of open-source evidence exists to substantiate that Clinton and Shearer are very closely connected.

For years, Shearer acted as something resembling an unaccountable private intelligence operative for Clinton while she was serving as secretary of state. Working in tandem with Clinton hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal, Shearer met with Libyan nationals to gather evidence on the latest happenings inside the country, emails leaked to WikiLeaks reveal.

Hillary Clinton has directly referenced “Cody” before. In a March 2011 email to Blumenthal, Clinton congratulated Shearer for his efforts on the Libya front. “Good for Cody! I’ll follow up,” the former secretary of state wrote from her private email address.

Clinton’s, Blumenthal’s, and Shearer’s carefully crafted plans for Libya did not work out as intended. Her insistence on toppling Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi led to region-wide destabilization. One year after Gadhafi was overthrown, Islamist radicals stormed two American facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Libya has become a “lawless” state and a hotbed for Islamist terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Shearer’s connections to Clinton go far beyond his stint as one of her private intelligence operatives. The left-leaning ProPublica, which describes him as a “longtime Clinton family operative,” has documented his decades of service for the Clinton family

ProPublica reports that Shearer’s “brother was an ambassador under Bill Clinton and his now-deceased sister was married to Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott—who was in close contact with Blumenthal.” Talbott has also served as the president of the Brookings Institution.

Shearer has in the past run into inquiries about his ethical conduct. In 1998, he was the subject of a State Department Inspector General probe after he conducted informal negotiations that "caused temporary diplomatic damage in Bosnia.” Shearer "may have represented himself as speaking on behalf of the U.S. Department of State,” when he was not authorized to do so, the inspector general inquiry said. Shearer’s ties to the Clinton family stretch all the way back to 1992, the Washington Examiner reported in its piece on the inspector general probe.

Not one, but two Trump-Russia dossiers are heavily tied to Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign paid for the research that led to the first dossier. And now we’ve learned that a second dossier was compiled by her trusted aide. We still don’t know for sure whether these dossiers were used to enact surveillance against the Trump campaign. However, that question might be cleared up this week, with the expected release of a congressional memo that documents the Obama administration’s alleged surveillance abuses.

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