Igor Danchenko has been revealed as a paid FBI informant, the latest bombshell disclosure showing the depths of an alleged partisan agenda within the FBI to discredit and disrupt the presidency of Donald Trump.
Danchenko was the main source of information for the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which was compiled by former-British-spy-turned-paid-operative Christopher Steele and commissioned by the Democratic National Committee to aid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
His time as an informant also overlaps with the period in which the FBI altered documents provided to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify spying on at least one Trump advisor.
Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by the Trump administration to uncover the origins of the FBI’s investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, indicted Danchenko in November 2021. He was charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI between March and November of 2017.
In court documents newly released in advance of the Russian’s trial next month, it has been revealed that Danchenko was apparently a paid FBI informant from 2017 until late 2020.
These revelations call into question numerous claims made by the FBI in recent years surrounding the credibility of Steele and the primary source of information for his dossier, Danchenko.
In released documents from March 2017, the FBI — referring to Steele as CROWN — stated, “CROWN’s reporting in this matter is derived primarily from a Russian-based source.”
“The FBI has no control over the Russian-based sub-source or any of the sub-sources used by the Russian-based sub-source,” the FBI went on to state, yet Danchenko would become a paid informant the very same month.
However, the FBI would continue its defense of the credibility of the Steele Dossier into 2018 when the agency prepared a brief on the issue for senators.
In the brief, the FBI claimed that the primary source, Danchenko, “maintains trusted relationships with individuals who are capable of reporting on the material he collected for Steele,” and said that “he did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier to the extent he could identify it.”
In an interview with Fox News at the time, Sen. Lindsey Graham decried, “This document clearly shows that the FBI was continuing to mislead regarding the reliability of the Steele dossier. The FBI did to the Senate Intelligence Committee what the Department of Justice and FBI had previously done to the FISA court: mischaracterize, mislead, and lie.”
In his latest court filing revealing the FBI’s true relationship with Danchenko, Durham wrote, “Over a fairly lengthy period of time, the FBI attempted to investigate, vet, and analyze the Steele Reports but ultimately was not able to confirm or corroborate most of their substantive allegations.”
It is now clear that throughout that time, the FBI was paying the main source of the dossier on which their investigations were relying.
Sky News’ Andrew Bolt lambasted the FBI for paying the main source of the “phony story” of Trump-Russian collusion in the 2016 campaign and said:
“More astonishing, this man [Danchenko] had links to Moscow to Russian intelligence and has admitted so. Can you believe that? That this giant Trump Collusion Hoax was largely inspired by fake claims from a Russian connected to Russian intelligence and a man paid by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign … it is the story of the century.”