Danchenko Lied To The FBI To Cover For A Key Source...
And That Key Source Turned Out To Be A Top Clinton Family Political Insider
After a brief lull of a few weeks since former Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted for making false statements to federal officials and pleading “not guilty”, the SpyGate scandal roared back to life on Thursday November 4 when news broke that Igor Danchenko had been arrested and that an indictment was being unsealed against him early Thursday morning in a Virginia courtroom.
Danchenko was the individual that former MI:6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele identified to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as his Primary Sub Source [PSS] for most of the Donald J. Trump/Vladimir Putin collusion allegations contained in his now infamous Steele dossier.
Who the PSS was for the dossier is not a minor thing, as several of the false second and third-hand stories in Steele’s dossier found their way into a federal surveillance warrant submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court [FISA Court or FISC] in late October of 2016.
That warrant, sworn out against Carter W. Page, who’d been a minor foreign policy advisor, was used to spy on presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s entire campaign team, and then his entire transition team, and following that, top Trump administration officials once they’d assumed office after Inauguration Day on January 20,2017. The fraudulently obtained warrant was renewed three times, finally being allowed to expire in September of 2017, more than eight months after Trump had been sworn in as the nation’s 45th President.
An in-depth investigation by DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz from early 2017 through December of 2019 revealed the fraudulent nature of the Page warrant with documented evidence, and the FISA Court subsequently found that the warrant it had granted to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team to spy on the Trump campaign was obtained illegitimately. In other words, the personnel involved in submitting that warrant had deceived the court and suppressed tons of exculpatory evidence in order to better ensure the Court granted the warrant application.
Cover-up For The FBI? How Could That Be Accomplished At This Point?
Some are speculating that a cover up is underway after reading the Durham indictment of Danchenko. They claim it lets the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team off the hook. Which is absurd. It’s already been documented in declassifications and official IG and FISA Court reports that particular FBI agents and DOJ officials deliberately excluded exculpatory evidence from the original warrant application and the three follow-up renewal applications.
There is even a comical section in Horowitz’s report where he discusses how it took an FBI lawyer from the Office of Intelligence three separate attempts to pry from FBI Agent Stephen Somma the fact that Christopher Steele was working for the Clinton campaign. I wrote about this at Uncover DC back in January of 2020.
That Steele was a paid private operative working for the Clinton campaign was just one of the key relevant facts all involved made damned sure the FISA Court did not know when the warrant application was submitted.
Then there’s the issue of Danchenko’s on-the-record disavowal of having been the source of the particular allegations that appear in the Carter Page warrant, a denial the FBI had in it’s hands and also kept from the FISA Court while submitting the warrant for renewal thrice.
That Durham is going to make sure the FBI gets off the hook and none of the former top agents and officials of the agency suffer any consequences for the Steele Dossier hoax is a non-starter. Documented public evidence says that won’t happen.
Horowitz’s FISA Abuse Report Established the Origin and Chain of Custody of the Steele Dossier Allegations
In that lengthy December 2019 report, IG Horowitz established that Danchenko was using a network of friends and acquaintances both in the United States and Russia as sources for the Trump/Russia allegations he was passing on to Steele. Steele and Fusion GPS cofounder Glenn Simpson then subsequently communicated those allegations to both the US news media and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Danchenko was never directly hired by Fusion GPS, the private US investigative firm that employed Steele. Instead, Danchenko was a contract employee of Steele’s U.K. based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
As part of his contract work for Orbis, Danchenko gathered research into alleged Trump/Russia activities. The Russian researcher took whatever rumors and 2nd and 3rd hand stories he heard from his circle of acquaintances and put them in what the indictment refers to as “Company Reports”.
The Steele Fraud
Although Steele pulls off an impressive appearance of being a cool and super-competent James Bond-like intelligence agent, SpyGate researchers such as myself, Tracy Beanz, Jeff Carlson, Fool Nelson, and several others can attest to the fact that his research product was shoddy and very unprofessional.
As I detailed in several columns for The Epoch Times, Steele’s work product was so sloppy he ended up getting himself sued in a U.K. court for libel for grabbing the name “Aleksej Gubarev” off of the old “iReports” website and pasting that into one of his dossier reports. Steele was apparently unaware that iReports was not a legitimate news source, it was a site containing blogs run by anonymous users. Or if he did know that, he was hoping nobody would show up to check his math.
So when pressed Steele couldn’t even give the name of the anonymous blogger who alleged that Gubarev was involved in the alleged hacking of the DNC emails.
It’s not going to be much of a shock watching the Durham Special Counsel’s Office demonstrate very clearly that nobody involved in any of this was much interested in actually vetting the Trump/Russia allegations as they were dutifully marched on their way to their final resting place snugly inside the Carter Page warrant application.
The FBI didn’t press Steele or Danchenko on where they got this stuff, they were too eager to make use of it, and nobody working on the project seemed to think anybody would ever come around asking the awkward questions once the 2016 election was over.
How Was The Identity of “PR Executive-1” Kept Secret For More Than 5 Years?
One of the key members of Danchenko’s network of associates is identified early on in the 39 page indictment as “PR Executive-1”. This person related to Danchenko several allegations about Trump/Russia collusion as well as a story about Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, being ousted from that job.
From the way the indictment is written, and the SCO takes you through the "PR Executive-1's" resume, they knew people would instantly determine who it was. So after 5 years of strict secrecy, the Danchenko indictment was used to make this revelation.
Note just how many key identifiers are in paragraphs 18. and 19. about ‘PR Executive-1’ that makes figuring out who he is pretty simple.
This person at the times covered by the indictment [2016-2017]:
Lived in Virginia
Was employed by a Washington D.C. public relations firm
Was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution
Had served as chairman of a national Democratic political organization
Was a state chair of former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 & 1996 presidential campaigns
Was an advisor to the 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign
Was appointed by Bill Clinton to two four-year terms on an advisory commission at the U.S. State Department
Was a campaign volunteer for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid
The number of people in the world with that exact resume is not going to be very large.
And thus far only one person has been demonstrated to exactly fit all 8 points of the indictment’s resume for “PR Executive-1”: top Clinton family supporter and advisor Charles H. “Chuck” Dolan.
The reason Dolan plays such a large role in the story told by the first half of the Danchenko indictment is that the defendant attempted to deceive the FBI about Dolan’s role as a source for some of the Trump/Russia allegations that Danchenko placed in his Company Reports to Orbis Business Intelligence. Some of these allegations from Dolan found their way into the Steele Dossier itself, as the New York Post reported:
That August, Danchenko emailed Dolan, saying he was working on a “project against Trump” and asking for “[a]ny thought, rumor, allegation” related to Manafort, who had recently resigned as Trump’s campaign chairman amid media investigations of his past work for pro-Russia Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych.
The following day, Dolan responded to Danchenko, claiming that “I had a drink with a GOP friend of mine” who had dished the dirt. Dolan’s email stated that a Trump campaign staffer, identifiable as former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “who hates [Manafort] and still speaks to Trump regularly played a role. He is said to be doing a happy dance over it.
“I think the bottom line is that in addition to the Ukraine revelations, a number of people wanted [Manafort] gone,” Dolan added. “It is a very sharp elbows crowd.”
In the Steele dossier, which was published in full by Buzzfeed News in January 2017, Dolan’s email is related nearly verbatim, though it is cited as coming from “an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign.”
Why Did Danchenko Make An Attempt To Shield Dolan From FBI Scrutiny As One of His Sources?
Why would Danchenko not want to give the FBI Dolan’s name as a source for some of the allegations that appeared in his Company Reports?
According to the indictment, Danchenko attributed the allegations he got from Dolan to a different person, “an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign”.
Steps were taken by all involved in this massive farce to avoid using the names of Hillary Clinton or anyone associated with her or her husband. Not only would the private operatives working for the Clinton campaign & the DNC not want to identify their employers to the federal agencies they were approaching with their manufactured hoaxes, they **certainly** did not want to identify Clinton-related persons as their **sources** for the Trump/Russia allegations they were handing off.
It is ironic that Danchenko ends up being indicted by the FBI for lying to them about Dolan, when Dolan quickly admitted to the FBI when questioned about being a source for some of the Dossier allegations that he’d made up his entire story about the Manafort firing. The previously mentioned NY Post story goes on to state:
The indictment says Dolan later told the FBI that he fabricated his “drink with a GOP friend” and merely sent Danchenko information about Manafort that he had gleaned from news reports.
While Dolan came clean and admitted to having made it all up, Danchenko is now regretting his actions in attempting to hide Dolan’s involvement in the collection of the allegations that made their way into the Steele Dossier.
Danchenko’s Second Big Mistake: Framing Sergei Millian
Claiming he didn’t get any of the Trump/Russia allegations from Dolan in an attempt to hide the Clinton’s associate as one of his key sources was only Danchenko’s first big mistake. The final 4 false statement charges in the indictment center around Danchenko’s claims that he got several of his Trump/Russia allegations from Sergei Millian - and he changed his story about this when asked by the FBI.
In fact, Danchenko and Millian have never met, and the Russian researcher’s claim that he had a phone conversation with someone he assumed was Millian is a provable lie. Which is why Durham is charging him for it.
Millian has been vocal for more than 5 years that he was not a source for any of the dossier allegations, that he had never met or spoken with Danchenko, and sum total of their contacts was two email communications that Danchenko set to him that he never responded to.
Emerging Controversy Over the Identity of the Indictment’s “PR Executive-1”
Although some of my fellow SpyGate researchers are presently theorizing about who “PR Executive-1” is in the Igor Danchenko federal grand jury indictment unsealed yesterday in Virginia, a lawyer has already publicly acknowledged that the person dubbed “PR Executive-1” is indeed his client, Charles H. “Chuck” Dolan.
It’s understandable why some people really **really** want PR Executive-1 to be Adam Waldman rather than Chuck Dolan, because that way they can tie the fake Trump/Russia allegation loop right to Senator Mark Warner and Diane Feinstein. It is very attractive for it to be Waldman, since that’s ‘better’ for throwing light on some things.
This brings up the issue that Dolan’s own lawyer is publicly admitting that the PR Executive-1 in the indictment is his client.
While some are free spin various theories, until it’s proven that Waldman has a resume that exactly tracks with that of Dolan, I’m going with the Dolan identification for now.
The Circle Is Almost Complete
The full farce of the Steele Dossier is now being laid bare by Durham in this indictment.
From early 2017 through the end of 2019, until both the Mueller Final Report and then the DOJ IG FISA Abuse Report finally killed it dead, the absurd narrative that Steele was some intrepid super-spy lifting key inside information about Donald Trump and his nefarious Russian handlers straight from highly placed Russian intelligence sources flourished and bloomed in the US mainstream press.
I and others who did the research and digging into SpyGate were always in on the joke about Steele. Now everyone else is too.
This new revelation - carefully guarded for more than half a decade - that one of the key sources for some of the Steele Dossier allegations was a top Clinton family associate who’d worked on every presidential campaign both Hillary and Bill ran is just the kind of plot twist the ever-growing SpyGate scandal needed at this point.
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Where's the picture of Fiona Hill?
Brian have you seen the interview with Kash Patel? Fast forward 35 minutes into timcast. He crushes Schiff the most but doesn’t hold back on anyone. Kash is a stud