John Durham’s trial against Igor Danchenko revealed that Robert Mueller’s special counsel team was investigating the discredited Trump dossier contrary to claims it was outside his purview — but the team couldn’t corroborate a single key claim.
Mueller’s April 2019 report did not establish any criminal Trump-Russia collusion but notably didn’t reach public conclusions on Christopher Steele’s dossier.
During his June 2019 congressional testimony, Mueller repeatedly dodged questions about Steele and his investigation into the dossier, pointing to a then-ongoing inquiry by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who eventually found deep flaws with the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation and pointed out that Danchenko and other facts undercut the dossier’s core claims.
Durham’s trial, through FBI witness testimony, helped fill in the gaps, revealing FBI investigators on the Mueller team researched the dossier claims and were unable to confirm any of its main allegations, even though they questioned both Danchenko and Steele. The court testimony also revealed the Mueller team shut down at least one investigative avenue into the dossier. The trial also revealed that Danchenko was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020.
FBI analyst Brian Auten, who interviewed Danchenko in early 2017, was also among the FBI employees who interviewed Steele in October 2016 as the FBI sought more details on the dossier. Auten revealed last week that the FBI had offered Steele an incentive of up to $1 million if he could prove the allegations of collusion in his dossier and if the evidence led to prosecutions, but Auten said the former MI6 agent was unable to corroborate the claims. Steele also declined to provide the identity of his sources, including Danchenko.
Auten and multiple other FBI officials testified during the trial that neither Steele nor Danchenko was ever able to corroborate any of the dossier’s claims. Auten also testified that other U.S. intelligence agencies looked into the dossier’s claims, but none could confirm the claims.
FBI agent Kevin Helson, who was the handling agent for Danchenko, testified he made an October 2020 request to pay Danchenko a lump sum of $346,000, and his testimony revealed that would have brought the total amount the Russian lawyer had been paid by the bureau over a few years up to $546,000. The lump sum payment request was denied.
Mueller team members such as Auten would feed questions about the dossier to Helson to ask Danchenko, but Helson testified that the dossier-related questions dwindled as time went on. He said Danchenko never provided any corroboration for the dossier claims.
Amy Anderson, currently a supervisory special agent, and Brittany Hertzog, a former FBI intelligence analyst, both testified last week that, as members of Mueller’s team specifically tasked with scrutinizing the dossier, they believed the FBI should interview and further investigate Charles Dolan, a longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, partly due to his business connections with Danchenko and Russian business and government officials.
The Mueller team members also testified that they were concerned about Dolan’s links to Danchenko’s friend Olga Galkina, who had been identified as a sub-source for Danchenko related to the dossier, although she denies being such a source.
Despite Dolan’s potential dossier links through Danchenko and Galkina, as well as his associations with Russian officials, Anderson and Hertzog said their efforts to investigate Dolan were shut down by their Mueller team superiors.
House Republicans pressed Mueller on the Steele dossier, whether he had investigated it, and what conclusions he had reached about its collusion claims. Mueller dodged each time, repeatedly claiming it was “outside my purview” and was being investigated by others at the Justice Department. The special counsel repeatedly refused to say whether his team had interviewed Steele.
Mueller said he would “defer” to DOJ when asked if the dossier was part of Russia’s interference efforts, and when asked whether the dossier was part of Russia’s disinformation efforts, he claimed that “that part of the building of the case predated me by at least 10 months.”
The dossier’s baseless claims about a well-developed collusion conspiracy between former President Donald Trump and the Russians were used in the FISA applications and renewals targeting Trump campaign associate Carter Page, and Mueller refused to say when he became aware of that.
Steele is mentioned by name just 14 times in Mueller’s report, and it repeatedly referred to the allegations in the dossier as “unverified.”
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When asked how the Mueller team came to the conclusion the allegations were unverified and how long it took them to reach it, Mueller said, “I’m not going to speak to that.”
