A former top federal prosecutor condemned the FBI for failures in the bureau’s handling of investigations into former President Donald Trump’s alleged involvement with the Russian government.
Writing for the New York Post, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew C. McCarthy went after the FBI’s conduct during the “Russiagate” investigation with renewed fury in light of special counsel John Durham’s upcoming trial in his investigation, prosecuting Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the unverified Steele dossier.
With the investigation coming to a close, McCarthy gave a scathing review of the FBI’s conduct for the past several years, primarily its apparent reliance on Danchenko. Despite the Russian-born lawyer’s dubious connections and credibility, including links to Russian intelligence and being the previous subject of a counterintelligence investigation from the FBI itself, the agency heavily relied on him as justification for the Trump-Russia investigation.
“[I]t gets worse,” McCarthy wrote of the FBI’s conduct.
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McCarthy listed the FBI’s alleged repeated failures and oversights in the investigation, writing, “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.”
The former prosecutor also described Durham’s revelation that Danchenko was a paid informant for the FBI from March 2017 through October 2020 as “jaw-dropping.”
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“Durham’s investigation indicates that Danchenko lied to the FBI multiple times, falsehoods that should have been easy for the nation’s flagship federal investigative agency to run down. Yet they kept him on board, kept paying him,” he wrote. “While the bureau used inane, unverified information from Steele and Danchenko to suggest to a court that the president of the United States might be a Russian asset, the FBI had intelligence indicating that Danchenko himself might actually have been a Russian asset.”
He also noted Durham’s discovery that Danchenko had been the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011, one that was stopped because the agency incorrectly believed that he had left the country.
McCarthy ended by asking, “What role did the FBI, whether by misfeasance or malfeasance, play in the Clinton campaign’s project to paint Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin? For now, we have to hope that Durham’s final report will answer that question.”
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Durham’s yearslong investigation will draw to a close by the end of this year, with the special counsel expected to present his full report to Attorney General Merrick Garland by the end of the year.
