Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier - New York Times
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • 3 years ago • 28 commentsBy: By Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.
The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham , who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.
Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier , a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.
The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.
Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.
But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.
The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.
A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.
The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2020 , Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.
“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”
Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.
Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.
The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann , which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.
Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.
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They gave themselves PULITZERS for pushing the lie that Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.
Slow and steady wins the race Mr. Durham. Kudos!
And he has so much to work with. The history books are going to tell quite a story.
So... What are the charges?
Helps to read prior to asking a question...........let me help you out.
That didn't seem to be an important question during the Russia hoax.
Here is the indictment:
Wow....39 pages, Hillary and Bill better get out their check book before this guys starts singing like a song bird. If I were him, I'd be worried about hanging myself in my cell (if you know what I mean or maybe a robbery where they don't take anything).
The Russia conspiracy was 100% concocted by the Clinton campaign. We need to gut the DOJ, FBI, CIA and State Department due to the corruption that took place.
The Washington Free Beacon?
What part of "The Clinton Campaign" is confusing you?
The Washington Free Beacon?
In the words of Clay Davis, that's some shameful shit.
Who still is ignorant enough to fall for that Washington Beacon lie?
What part of "The Washington Free Beacon" is confusing you?
Everybody that is not fooled by the right's attempt to re-write history.
Conservative Free Beacon originally funded firm that created Trump-Russia dossier
Key word - "originally"
"The firm, Fusion GPS — which has been entwined in federal and congressional probes into Russian election interference in 2016 — was retained by the Free Beacon during the 2016 elections "to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary," Free Beacon editor and chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said in the statement.
Do you understand how time works? And the concept that businesses have different clients and different projects and those projects end?
If you hire a layer to defend yourself against a speeding charge, and a rapist hires that lawyer to defend himself in a rape case months later, did you pay to defend the rapist?
Did you not read MooseKnuckle's comment ? He stated that Hillary paid "100%". Both you and Just Jim have now acknowledged that she did not pay 100% of it, and that was the simple point I was trying to make. I'm sorry the truth seems to offend you guys so much.
May want to read that comment again. He said NOTHING about paid 100%. He said "concocted". They got hold of it after the Beacon hired Fusion and it took off from there.
Kind of a bitch when your own methods bite ya in the butt doesn't it.
So you are claiming that the info that the Beacon got had no mention of anything Russian? Can't wait to see your evidence of that.
Nope not claiming that at all and quit putting words in my posts. Thank you. The Beacon never got the finished product.
"But in a statement posted Friday evening, the Free Beacon says it doesn't have anything to do with the actual dossier.
"The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele," wrote the site's Editor in Chief Matthew Continetti and Chairman Michael Goldfarb."
Both you and Just Jim have now acknowledged that she did not pay 100% of it, and that was the simple point I was trying to make
Of course she paid 100%. Do you know how time works? Look when Steele was hired.
None.
Everyone who has done any research AT ALL knows the Clinton Campaign funded the Steele Dossier. It isn't a secret, you know.
They had nothing to do with the Steele Dossier. To try and imply such is an absolute lie.
Goebbels philosophy is still strong on the left. This is a lie that has been disproven; yet the left still keep trotting it out.
It doesn't matter how many times it gets debunked, which has to be in the hundreds on this site alone by this point.
The next time this comes up, someone will claim the Republicans funded the Steele dossier.
It's going to be fun watching the Democrats try to squirm out of this.
On the one hand, it's amusing to see those who shilled the most shrilly about Russian stooges and treason were actually the Russian stooges themselves. Putin never had a better friend than American progressives and their media.
But it's also incredibly sad to see the damage these stooges did to the country, and how the worst of them persist in doing Putin's work for him to this day.
Well, whatdaya know. A Russian has finally been arrested for meddling in the 2016 election. Of course, now we have to put up with a lot of 'look squirrel' arguments to protect the Clintons again.
Remember Fiona Hill?