(JustPatriots.com)- According to a shocking new court document published on Tuesday, the Russian analyst accused of lying to the FBI about his involvement in creating the infamous Steele dossier was working for the agency as a confidential informant.
Igor Danchenko was employed by the FBI in March 2017, as disclosed by Special Counsel John Durham, months after the bureau initially questioned him regarding his work on the dossier. Durham accused Danchenko of lying to the FBI about his work on the dossier and the people who provided the bogus report’s sources.
Durham claims that the charges in the dossier that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election were “manufactured” by Danchenko. At the time, Danchenko worked for Christopher Steele, the dossier’s author, who looked into Donald Trump for the Clinton campaign.
The relationship between the FBI and Danchenko ended in October 2020 and is expected to come under scrutiny due to the petition. In 2009, while employed as an analyst for leftist Washington, D.C., thinks tank Brookings Institution, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against him. Danchenko allegedly asked a coworker to sell him confidential material. When Danchenko left the country in 2011, the FBI ended the case.
Danchenko left the Brookings Institution and started working for Steele’s private intelligence company Orbis. Former British intelligence officer Steele used Danchenko to gather details about Trump’s potential ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Based on Danchenko’s assertions, Steele wrote 17 memoranda. He divulged some details to the State Department, the FBI, the Clinton campaign, and other media outlets.
It’s unclear if the FBI employed Danchenko as part of the investigation into the Trump campaign or to offer information regarding the Steele dossier. Danchenko was first questioned by the FBI in January 2017, not long after BuzzFeed News made the dossier public. Danchenko minimized the assertions made in the lewd paper, telling FBI agents that Steele had exaggerated allegations of a Trump campaign-Russia conspiracy.
Even though Danchenko cast doubt on some portions of the dossier during those interviews, the FBI failed to provide the material to the federal judge that authorized the Trump campaign’s surveillance.
The Justice Department inspector general criticized the FBI for not checking the dossier before using it as the basis for the surveillance warrants. The inspector general also discovered that FBI agents concealed defense-supporting information that refuted the cooperation theory.
