Igor Danchenko has said the FBI will praise his work as a paid informant, with the main source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier facing a false statements case next week for allegedly repeatedly lying to authorities.
Between March 2017 and October 2020, Danchenko was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source before he was charged in November 2021 on five counts of making false statements to the bureau. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges brought by special counsel John Durham, and his trial begins Tuesday.
“We expect the jury will hear that Mr. Danchenko was a vital source of information to the U.S. government during the course of his cooperation and was relied upon to build other cases and open other investigations,” his defense lawyers said in court filings.
DURHAM CAN’T USE DANCHENKO’S RUSSIAN INTEL LINKS AT TRIAL
Durham’s indictment says Danchenko lied to the FBI about the existence of a phone call he claims he received in the summer of 2016 from Sergei Millian, an American citizen born in Belarus, who the Steele source had said told him about a conspiracy of cooperation between Trump and the Russians, which the special counsel says is false.
Danchenko also allegedly anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent years doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government, including in 2016.
Despite these alleged lies, Danchenko worked as a confidential human source on the FBI payroll for years.
The special counsel has previously highlighted how Danchenko was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation as a potential national security threat from 2009 to 2011 and wanted findings from that investigation, which unearthed links between the defendant and Russian intelligence officers, to be used at trial.
Judge Anthony Trenga, who is overseeing the Danchenko case, denied Durham’s request this week.
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The FBI counterintelligence summary said the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating claims of Trump-Russia collusion identified Danchenko as Steele’s main dossier source and became aware of the prior counterintelligence investigation into the Russian in December 2016.
The dossier was created after Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was itself hired by Perkins Coie and Marc Elias, the general counsel for Clinton’s campaign.
