Jonathan Winer explains his role in the Shearer/Steele memos

Here’s the real story: In the 1990s, I was the senior official at the State Department responsible for combating transnational organized crime. I became deeply concerned about Russian state operatives compromising and corrupting foreign political figures and businessmen from other countries. Their modus operandi was sexual entrapment and entrapment in too-good-to-be-true business deals.

  Jonathan Winer @ WaPo

No wonder they thought Trump would be an easy target.

After 1999, I left the State Department and developed a legal and consulting practice that often involved Russian matters. In 2009, I met and became friends with [Christopher] Steele, after he retired from British government service focusing on Russia. Steele was providing business intelligence on the same kinds of issues I worked on at the time.

In 2013, I returned to the State Department at the request of Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

[...]

[Steele] asked me whether the State Department would like copies of new information as he developed it. I contacted Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who was then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and shared with her several of Steele’s reports. She told me they were useful and asked me to continue to send them. [...] None of the reports related to U.S. politics or domestic U.S. matters.

Winer says Steele contacted him in September of 2016, telling him that Russia had been behind the DNC and Clinton hacking and also had compromised the Trump campaign. He reviewed Steele's reports and made a two-page summary of them to present to Nuland, who agreed with him that Secretary of State Kerry should be told about the reports.

Shortly thereafter, he was talking with reporter Sid Blumenthal, a friend of the Clintons, and whose emails had also been hacked "through a Russian server" in 2013. They discussed Steele's reports, and Blumenthal showed Winer some notes by a journalist Winer didn't know (Cody Shearer) alleging the Russians had kompromat on Trump "of a sexual and financial nature." Winer thought the information was similar to Steele's but seemed to come from different sources.

On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction. He told me it was potentially “collateral” information. I asked him what that meant. He said that it was similar but separate from the information he had gathered from his sources. I agreed to let him keep a copy of the Shearer notes.

Winer says he didn't share or mention Shearer's notes to anyone at State, and didn't expect them to be shared with anyone in the US government, learning later that Steele had shared them with the FBI.

I am in no position to judge the accuracy of the information generated by Steele or Shearer. But I was alarmed at Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and so were U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials. I believe all Americans should be alarmed — and united in the search for the truth about Russian interference in our democracy, and whether Trump and his campaign had any part in it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.