Did someone say the FBI has a second Trump dossier?
Why, yes — in fact, two someones: Guardian writers Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins!
The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out some of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy.
The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.
Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election.
However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the ‘Shearer memo’ and is pursuing intriguing leads.
One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously…
The Shearer memo was provided to the FBI in October 2016.
It was handed to them by Steele – who had been given it by an American contact – after the FBI requested the former MI6 agent provide any documents or evidence that could be useful in its investigation, according to multiple sources.
For nearly a generation, the lunatic right has hated Cody Shearer, in no small part because he is a traitor to the moneyed, privileged, and generally prosperous right-leaning class — but also because he is not afraid to write about sleazy right-wing operatives:
The Shearers are also the kind of people Republican mugwumps despise most viscerally: privileged, socially and professionally ambitious dissenters whose liberal-left politics don’t prevent them from enjoying the prerogatives of membership in the establishment. Lloyd Shearer, the patriarch of the clan, was for many years the editor of Parade magazine, which, during the Reagan era, interspersed its celebrity profiles and sensible recipes with anxious warnings about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. His son Derek, a former professor at Occidental College, served in Clinton’s Commerce Department and then as his ambassador to Finland. Derek also co-authored a book called Economic Democracy, which served as something of a manifesto for Tom Hayden when the former SDSer abandoned radicalism for the California Senate in the early 1980s. Worse yet, Derek’s wife, Ruth Yannatta Goldway, was elected mayor of Santa Monica in 1981 on a pro-rent-control ticket. To a Southern California Republican, this is like saying she was the president of North Korea. Derek’s sister Brooke worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff and is married to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the president’s buddy from his Oxford days, long suspected by the right of being soft on communism.
But [Chris] Matthews [who had interviewed Kathleen Willey in 1999 when Hardball was on CNBC, and was at the time strongly biased against Bill and Hillary Clinton and riding the right-wing wave of the right’s anti-Clinton sentiment] did not suggest that any of these Shearers were stalking [Willey] in a quiet Virginia subdivision on a damp winter morning. The Shearer in question, he declared, was Brooke’s twin brother, Cody. … Joe Conason, who debunks rumors about Clinton and his circle with the same dogged zeal with which Matthews advances them, defended Shearer in a recent Salon column. Shearer could not have been Willey’s stalker, Conason declared, because he was in San Francisco Jan. 8.
So gird yourself for the usual mighty Wurlitzer nonsense about what an evil, awful, horrible person Cody Shearer is — but then, consider the people doing the complaining! ‘Nuff said…
