Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with Brian Auten told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow.
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While it’s bad enough the debunked dossier the FBI used to spy on the Trump campaign was paid for by the Clinton campaign and authored by a foreign FBI informant and his carousing researcher, the newly released report of Special Counsel John Durham strongly suggests a top Justice Department official and his wife had an early hand in shaping the political rumor sheet.
According to the 306-page report, former Justice Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of a research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research firm the Clinton campaign commissioned to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia.
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Igor Danchenko is the named defendant at this week’s trial, charged with lying as an informant in the now discredited Russia collusion investigation. But with probing questions and searing redirects, Special Counsel John Durham has turned the Russian researcher’s trial in the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria, Va., into an expose of stunning FBI failures and omissions in its now-infamous pursuit of Donald Trump for crimes that turned out to be nonexistent.
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The Igor Danchenko trial, which started this week, has already yielded embarrassing revelations about the “Steele dossier” fiasco. The FBI, it turns out, offered Christopher Steele, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s opposition researcher, $1 million to prove his claims about Trump–Russia collusion. He couldn’t do it. But that didn’t stop the FBI from using his tissue of lies to obtain a search warrant against Carter Page, a hapless Trump campaign volunteer.
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In anticipation of Justice Department special counsel John Durham’s final report on the partisan origins of the Obama administration’s investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, the ruling class is scoffing at his findings to date. What a yawner, they say. What a waste of time and money. Never mind that his investigation has already established that the Russian disinformation in the 2016 election came exclusively from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
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In a bombshell revelation, Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed Tuesday in court filings that the FBI paid a Russian businessman as a confidential human source in the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign even though it had prior concerns that businessman was tied to Moscow’s intelligence services.
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Special counsel John Durham on Tuesday asked a federal court to issue 30 subpoenas for testimony in the trial against Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the discredited Steele dossier.
The court filing asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to issue the subpoenas for an “appearance before said Court at Alexandria, Virginia,” starting on Oct. 11 “to testify on behalf of the United States.”
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The indictment of Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” of Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier, reveals that the FBI electronically recorded several previously undisclosed interviews with the Brookings Institution researcher. Separately, it raises suspicions, according to congressional sources, that his Brookings superior Fiona Hill may have committed perjury when testifying about Steele during President Trump’s first impeachment.
The existence of electronic records of Danchenko speaking to the FBI far more extensively than previously known creates the possibility that much more will come out about the origins of the Steele dossier and the way the opposition research was weaponized. And those under scrutiny in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia affair will have to wonder whether information to which they previously attested jibes with the Danchenko recordings.
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The indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Steele dossier, provides damning evidence alleging the Russian analyst repeatedly lied to the FBI. But it’s only part of a larger portrait emerging in federal court records chronicling how the U.S. government was bamboozled into investigating Donald Trump for Russia collusion by a circle of players connected to Hillary Clinton.
Just a few weeks before his arrest Thursday, Danchenko was served in late September with a federal subpoena in a separate civil case brought by executives connected to the Russia-based Alfa Bank. That case, like the indictment, has produced evidence Danchenko contrived the intelligence he provided to former MI6 agent Christopher Steele in 2016.
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Special Counsel John Durham on Thursday unsealed a federal grand jury indictment charging the primary source for the now-discredited Steele dossier with repeatedly lying to the FBI during the Russia collusion investigation that falsely tarred Donald Trump’s presidency.
The 39-page indictment alleges Russian analyst Igor Danchenko misled the FBI about his contacts with Russian government officials and a Democrat-connected public relations executive, falsehoods that materially affected the FBI’s investigation and its representations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get warrants targeting Trump’s campaign and one of its advisers.
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President Donald Trump is working to declassify documents related to the Russia investigation while he recovers from coronavirus at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his chief of staff said Monday.
“This morning we’ve already had a couple of discussions on items that he wants to get done,” Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, said in an interview on “Fox & Friends.”
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