The alleged source for disgraced former spy Christopher Steele’s infamous anti-Trump dossier was a paid confidential human source for the FBI, a court filing has claimed.
Special counsel John Durham included the allegation in a court filing on Tuesday accusing Igor Danchenko of collecting a check from the FBI from 2017 to 2020 despite the Russian-born lawyer being charged with five counts of making false statements tied to what he told the bureau about the dossier.
“From January 2017 through October 2020, and as part of its efforts to determine the truth or falsity of specific information in the Steele reports, the FBI conducted multiple interviews of the defendant regarding, among other things, the information that he had provided to Steele,” Durham told the court Tuesday. “In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI. The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. … The defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”
According to Durham, Danchenko anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government.
Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The special counsel said he plans on calling a witness who would undermine the unfounded “pee tape” allegations that Danchenko allegedly passed to Steele and were published in the dossier.
The special counsel has also discovered that Danchenko was investigated by the FBI in 2009 as a possible “threat to national security,” according to documents declassified by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who had made Durham special counsel in October 2020, the same month Danchenko was finally cut off as an FBI source.
WHO IS IGOR DANCHENKO, THE STEELE DOSSIER SOURCE CHARGED BY JOHN DURHAM?
The claim came just hours before the New York Times reported Wednesday that “people familiar with the matter” said Durham’s criminal grand jury has ended and that there are no plans to revive it, meaning his investigation may be wrapping up ahead of Danchenko’s October trial.
The Justice Department and the FBI have repeatedly defended their use of information from Danchenko well after he allegedly lied to them in communications with Congress defending the Trump-Russia investigation, including amid special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Danchenko has lived and worked in the Washington, D.C., area for many years and allegedly relied on a network of Russian contacts. The alleged sources for Steele’s dossier have largely either been accused of lying, have denied being sources, or have otherwise backed away from the dossier.
The dossier was created after Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was itself hired by the Perkins Coie law firm through Marc Elias, the general counsel for Clinton’s campaign, with funding from the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Steele was working for Putin-allied oligarch Oleg Deripaska before, during, and after his time targeting then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Deripaska had paid Steele to investigate Manafort after accusing the Republican operative of stealing millions from him, and Steele sought help from Fusion GPS in early 2016.
