British ex-spy Christopher Steele trashed John Durham after Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, the main source for the former MI6 agent’s discredited anti-Trump dossier, was found not guilty this week of lying to the FBI.
Steele was hired to put his dossier together by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself was hired by Clinton campaign general counsel March Elias and was paid by the Clinton campaign. Steele put Danchenko to work on the dossier, and he has repeatedly stood by his Democratic-funded dossier in the past.
“Igor Danchenko’s unmasking and indictment is one of the most disgraceful episodes in U.S. judicial history,” Steele tweeted on Wednesday. “Igor, a valuable FBI source on Russia, was thrown under the bus for partisan political gain. [In my opinion] the only beneficiaries from [William] Barr and Durham’s actions are Putin and the FSB.” The FSB is Russia’s main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
ANTI-TRUMP DOSSIER SOURCE FOUND NOT GUILTY IN RUSSIA INVESTIGATION TRIAL
The Danchenko trial revealed that the Russian was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020.
The dossier’s biggest claim was that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation “did not establish” any such criminal collusion. Horowitz said Danchenko “contradicted the allegations” of a well-developed conspiracy in Steele’s dossier.
According to Durham’s November 2021 indictment, Danchenko anonymously sourced a fabricated claim from Charles Dolan, a Clinton ally who spent years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government, but in a blow to Durham’s case, the judge threw out that charge before the jury could decide on it.
FBI analyst Brian Auten, who interviewed Danchenko in early 2017 and was there when the Justice Department set up a partial immunity agreement with the Steele source, was also among the FBI employees who interviewed Steele in Rome in early 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.
“To correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to ‘prove up’ our Trump-Russia reporting,” Steele contended on Wednesday. “Rather, we were told there were substantial funds to resettle sources in the U.S. if they were prepared to testify in public. Understandably they were not.”
Auten and multiple other FBI officials testified during the trial that neither Steele nor Danchenko were 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 that 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 a total of $546,000. The lump sum payment request was denied.
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A member of the FBI’s Human Intelligence Validation Unit also suggested that Danchenko may have been part of Russian intelligence services, according to court testimony.
It has been revealed that Danchenko was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation for being a possible national security threat in 2009 and 2010, with the botched inquiry unearthing links between the defendant and Russian intelligence officers.
Steele was working for Putin-allied Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska before, during, and after his time targeting Trump in 2016. Deripaska had paid Steele to investigate future Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort after accusing the GOP operative of stealing millions from him, and Steele sought help from Fusion in early 2016. Deripaska was charged with Russian sanctions evasion by the Justice Department in September.
