by Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller:

• 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.

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