Andrew C. McCarthy
NY Post, Sept. 18, 2022
“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.”
Russiagate special counsel John Durham is in the homestretch. His grand jury wrapped up work last week, apparently with no new indictments on the horizon. Attorney General Merrick Garland is said to anticipate receiving his final report by the end of the year. And Durham is gearing up for his last trial: the prosecution of Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the discredited Steele dossier.
That last one should be grabbing our attention. We now know that the so-called dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was a Clinton campaign production. It is one of the great dirty tricks in modern political history: The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign colluded with the incumbent Democratic administration’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to portray their partisan opposition, Donald Trump, as a Kremlin mole, then made the smear stick to the point of forcing Trump to govern for over two years under the cloud of a special-counsel investigation.
This enterprise included substantial reliance by the FBI on the bogus Steele dossier in obtaining spying authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — on sworn representations that the bureau believed Trump was in a “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin’s anti-American regime.
Danchenko turns out to have been Steele’s principal source for this fever dream. Last year, Durham indicted him on five counts of lying to the FBI. But that’s not the half of it. Last week, in a jaw-dropping court submission, Durham revealed that the FBI signed up Danchenko as an informant and paid him for almost three years — from March 2017 through October 2020. …SOURCE