Russiagate special counsel John Durham is in the homestretch. His grand jury wrapped up work last week, apparently with no new indictments on the horizon. Attorney General Merrick Garland is said to anticipate receiving his final report by the end of the year. And Durham is gearing up for his last trial: the prosecution of Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the discredited Steele dossier.
That last one should be grabbing our attention. We now know that the so-called dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was a Clinton campaign production. It is one of the great dirty tricks in modern political history: The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign colluded with the incumbent Democratic administration’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to portray their partisan opposition, Donald Trump, as a Kremlin mole, then made the smear stick to the point of forcing Trump to govern for over two years under the cloud of a special-counsel investigation.
This enterprise included substantial reliance by the FBI on the bogus Steele dossier in obtaining spying authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — on sworn representations that the bureau believed Trump was in a “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin’s anti-American regime.
Danchenko turns out to have been Steele’s principal source for this fever dream. Last year, Durham indicted him on five counts of lying to the FBI. But that’s not the half of it. Last week, in a jaw-dropping court submission, Durham revealed that the FBI signed up Danchenko as an informant and paid him for almost three years — from March 2017 through October 2020.
Failure upon failure
If you’re keeping score, that would be throughout (a) most of the FISC-authorized surveillance; (b) the Mueller investigation, which somehow failed to detect — or at least to report — that Danchenko misled the bureau; and (c) Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigations of the FBI’s misconduct in the Trump investigation — in the reports of which there is no indication that Horowitz was told Danchenko was on the bureau payroll and available to be interviewed.
There’s more. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times |
Russian-born Igor Danchenko made up sources for two of the most sensational claims in the Steele dossier––that President Donald Trump once saw prostitutes in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and that he engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy’ with the Kremlin.
The FBI could have ended Mr. Danchenko’s Washington career in 2010 after learning he wanted to buy classified information from Obama aides and pass it to Russia, but the agency botched the probe.
When the dossier was leaked in January 2017, those two claims drove the media to label Mr. Trump an election cheater and traitor.
Days later, Democrats at a House intelligence hearing tried to get witnesses such as FBI Director James Comey to attest that Russian intelligence typically orchestrates sex in Moscow hotel rooms for blackmail.
On Sept. 13, a new filing by prosecutor John Durham said Mr. Danchenko had zero sources for those claims which he fed to his London client, dossier author Christopher Steele. He was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
We also learned that Mr. Danchenko coached a previous client on how to fabricate sources in intelligence reports, advising this client to put sources in all-caps–––which Mr. Steele did in the subsequent 2016 dossier.
Mr. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to five charges of lying to the FBI.
Mr. Durham’s legal brief reveals how the FBI top echelon kept Mr. Trump under investigation for years while agents used the hoax dossier to pursue him.
Mr. Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) in March 2017 after a session lying to agents, Mr. Durham now discloses. The hiring explains why he sat down with them for repeated interviews. --->READ MORE HERE
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