FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Team Hired Danchenko As A Confidential Human Source
And Kept Him On The Payroll for 3 1/2 Years Despite Knowing He Was Lying To Them
The trial of Hillary Clinton campaign dirty trickster Igor Danchenko is not slated to begin for another 4 weeks, but Special Counsel John Durham dropped a thunderbolt in a new filing in the case yesterday.
As I suspected for months now, the FBI did indeed hire Steele Dossier main source Igor Danchenko as a Confidential Human Source [CHS] as part of it's Crossfire Hurricane continuing investigation after Trump assumed occupancy of the Oval Office.
We haven't even got to the trial yet and Durham has already dropped a massive bomb on the FBI.
It’s important to fully grasp the import of this revelation that Durham just made.
Nobody at the FBI was ever fooled. They saw Clinton’s dirty tricks squad coming from a mile away. The Obama White House knew about Hillary’s dirty trick operation by the end of August 2016; the FBI knew by the end of September 2016 when both Director James Comey and Peter Strzok got a heads up from the CIA about it.
They knew the dossier was fake. That the Trump/Russia collusion allegations in it were fake.
They all this stuff was coming to them straight from the Clinton campaign.
They used it in a FISA warrant anyway. They committed a massive fraud on the FISA court.
And they didn't stop there.
The FBI Crossfire Hurricane team then hired the Russian dirty trickster behind the Steele Dossier as a CHS for 3 1/2 years, from March of 2017 to October of 2020 as they continued to work to sabotage and undermine the Presidency of one Donald J. Trump.
Treason.
Why Hire Danchenko As A CHS?
I guess the FBI figured Danchenko had done such a brilliant job inventing allegations of fake Trump/Russia collusion while he was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Crossfire Hurricane team decided to have him come aboard as a CHS so he could work his fabulist magic for them too!
All kidding aside…this is a serious thing. After all, notice when they hired Dancheko as a CHS: In March of 2017. By that time the 2016 election over, and so was the transition period. Trump had been sworn in as the nation’s duly elected 45th President on January 20th.
They put Danchenko on ice so no one could get to him and expose him while the Crossfire Hurricane team continued their efforts to take down the Trump presidency.
The only new wrinkle was that the FBI team was later joined in it’s efforts by the Mueller Special Counsel Team, which was created in May of 2017.
Durham's going to establish in the courtroom during Igor Danchenko's trial some very crucial facts about his background.
Facts that have been ignored and under reported by the press.
Let me take you all back to the dim dark days of....2018.
I had just recently begun writing for The Epoch Times.
John Solomon - then of The Hill - broke a big story. He'd gotten a look at some handwritten notes scribbled down by the Department of Justice's #3 guy, Bruce Ohr, notes Ohr wrote down in a meeting back in 2016 with Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson.
In that meeting, Simpson confided to Ohr that the main source for Christopher Steele's fake dossier was "a former Russian intelligence officer who now lives in the US".
Remember, back in August of 2018 when this story broke, nobody had ever heard of Igor Danchenko yet. DOJ Inspector General Horowitz hadn't even released his FISA Abuse Report yet - he did that in Dec. of 2019.
Rampant speculation abounded over who Steele's main source was who'd fed him all these 3rd hand accounts of Trump/Russia collusion.
So I engaged in a little speculation myself.
I wrote a column in which I speculated that perhaps the source for much of the dossier was Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian lobbyist who's name had already surfaced several times in relation to Fusion GPS.
OK so it wasn't Rinat Akhmetshin…
Turns out the 'former Russian intelligence officer now living in the US" who put together most of the fake Trump/Russia collusion allegations for Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS was....
Igor Danchenko!
You can read John Solomon's report on Ohr's handwritten notes right here.
It’s really interesting that Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson was going around Washington DC back in 2016 telling people like Bruce Ohr that Danchenko is a former Russian intelligence officer.
There were two big revelations that I expected to come out during the Danchenko trial:
1. That he is a 'former' Russian intelligence officer now living in the US who supplied most of the fake Trump/Russia allegations that make up the Steele Dossier
and
2. He knew it was safe to return to the US because he was working with the people trying to dirty up Trump with fake collusion allegations that then morphed into trying to sabotage and hamstring the Trump presidency. They went from allowing him to return to outright hiring him as a CHS and keeping him on their payroll for more than 3 years as the entire SpyGate scandal unfolded from January 2017 with the publication of the Steele Dossier by Buzzfeed, up until just before the 2020 election when they let Danchenko go that October.
Well....SURPRISE!
Turns out Durham didn't wait for the trial to actually start before dropping his first bombshell.
The Whole Time Democrats & The Fake News Media Were Relentlessly Driving The Fake RussiaGate Scandal, Danchenko Was Being Kept On Ice By The FBI
The entire time Democrats and the media was in a feeding frenzy over "RussiaGate" from January 2017 to 2020 and beyond, the entire time the Mueller Special Counsel was active, the entire time Gen. Flynn and others were being targeted for investigations and prosecutions based on fake allegations or no evidence whatsoever....
…the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team and the Mueller Special Counsel had ol' Igor tucked safely away for safekeeping.
The whole time people were running around trying to make sense of the Dossier, where it's fake allegations came from, who the primary source was, the source was being paid by the FBI to hide and keep his mouth shut.
Danchenko’s name was finally publicly revealed in July of 2020 when some intrepid SpyGate researcher’s used some recently declassified documents to finally identify him.
But then a year went by and Danchenko probably thought he was safe. Nothing much seemed to be happening until he was suddenly indicted by Special Counsel John Durham in November of 2021.
My Speculation Based On The Emerging Timeline
Here’s what I suspect happened: The FBI was alerted by Durham that he was investigating Danchenko and his background. And they were alerted to this unfortunate and unwanted development around…October of 2020, when Durham had just been designated a Special Counsel. One of the first items of business Durham likely engaged in was asking for any and all records the FBI had on Danchenko. Which would include the records about him being their own CHS and the interview recordings and transcripts they had.
We’ve already seen one example of what happened when a federal agency tried to get cute with Durham when he publicly punked the DOJ IG’s office.
So it doesn’t appear the FBI tried to get clever with Durham and the agency handed over what was requested.
I don’t get sense from reading this situation that the FBI was eager to cough up this embarrassing revelation that Danchenko was on their payroll while the RussiaGate hoax was in full swing for 3 1/2 years, and that they’d taped interviews with him in direct contravention of regular protocol, interviews in which it’s clear he’s repeatedly lying to them on multiple issues. It brings up all kinds of interesting questions.
Anybody who is assuming the FBI is thrilled that their hiring of Danchenko as a CHS and that they kept him on their payroll for 3 1/2 years has just been publicly revealed by the Durham Special Counsel's Office is making a bad assumption.
As far as the current and former FBI Crossfire Hurricane team is concerned, nobody was ever supposed to find any of this out.
If you think they're looking forward to Durham exposing all their deepest darkest dirtiest secrets in court filings and before the trial jury, you are really looking at this backwards.
Whatever the case, it seems clear to me that it wasn’t the FBI’s idea to reveal that Danchenko was their CHS for more than 3 years. It wasn’t the FBI’s idea to prosecute Danchenko for the lies he told during the interviews, either. If the FBI had had it’s way, all of this stuff would have stayed buried for good. Nobody would even know who Danchenko is at this point.
This is a Durham show from A to Z.
If anything, the FBI at this point really really wishes Durham would just go away.
Devin Nunes Gets It
Devin Nunes will be able to freely talk once Durham's revealed more of his evidence. Nunes has avoided leaking or ‘accidently’ revealing classified or grand jury evidence for going on 4 years now. I’m sure it hasn’t been easy for him. Especially when he was in the US Congress surrounded on all sides by inviolate leakers like Adam Schiff.
Nunes always said when people found out what really happened with SpyGate, it would blow their minds. He’s right.
Especially after the Fake News spent more than 5 years trying to program everybody about who it supposedly was in the 2016 election that was working with Russian intelligence.
They insisted there was good credible evidence that showed Donald Trump and his associates were Putin affiliated, working behind the scenes with the Russians to undermine and sabotage American interests.
But that was never true.
In fact it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that was paying an actual Russian national, a 'former' [note I always put 'former' in quotes?] Russian intelligence officer to create most of the Steele Dossier accusing Trump and his team of being Russian agents.
Remember what happened in March 2017: Devin Nunes gave that press conference in which he looked like he'd just seen a ghost.
He'd been shown intel reports that had been circulating at the highest levels of the outgoing Obama administration that included transcripts of phone calls and text messages between members of...
are you sitting down?
...members of the Trump transition team.
Discussing the transition.
That's right. Somebody was surveilling and intercepting the electronic comms between members of the Trump transition team, transcribing those conversations and putting them in reports being passed around inside the Obama White House.
Somebody tipped Nunes off and showed him those reports with the transition team transcripts in them.
That alerted the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team to the fact they had insiders working against them to tip off the good guys and expose what they were doing.
One of the first countermeasures the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team seems to have taken once they realized they faced exposure was to hire Danchenko as a CHS and put him on ice for 3 1/2 years.
Imagine if someone had exposed Danchenko and gotten to him back in 2017 when the RussiaGate narrative was still gaining steam; the Comey memos, the Mueller Special Counsel being formed, General Flynn being charged, etc.
If it had come out then in 2017 or even in 2018 that the Steele Dossier was made up fake crap from a Russian intelligence officer, their narrative dies.
So it was very important to certain people to keep Danchenko hidden while they extracted as much mileage as they possibly could from the RussiaGate hoax.
Which they accomplished by making him a CHS and paying him.
After 3 1/2 years of being assured he was protected, and that his role would never be exposed, not only was Danchenko uncovered, he was dragged out into the light and then shocked to find himself hit with 5 false statement charges by The Special Counsel Who Was Supposed To Never Happen.
And now this Special Counsel is going to use Dancheko's trial to blow a lot of minds as he maps out exactly how the FBI caught their own CHS in lie after lie, after lie..and kept paying him and using his fake shit to go after Donald Trump and his associates, all from March 2017 through October of 2020.
Ain't life grand?
Think on it, now. 5 years they managed to keep a lid on this, that Hillary had paid an actual ‘former’ Russian intelligence officer to help her campaign create a fake dossier accusing her political rival of being a Russian agent. And the FBI was so determined to carry on with this charade once Trump was in the Oval Office that they hired this goon as a CHS and hid him for 3 1/2 years of Trump’s term in the White House.
Durham's about to take the lid off this Pandora’s Box live in front of the jury with evidence in the courtroom.
And I'm gonna enjoy watching it. And you can too!
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Great article, Brian, thank you for the excellent reporting and God Bless!
Brian, I read the grand jury has been disbanded? What's going on?