The Only Question is WHICH Federal Officials Christopher Steele Lied To And When He Lied To Them

The Different Stories Steele Told The FBI & The State Department About His Primary Sub Source Is About To Catch Up With Him

As Special Counsel John Durham just made abundantly clear to all involved in the creation and the handing off both the Steele Dossier and Alfa Bank hoaxes to federal agencies, it is a chargeable crime to make a false statement to federal officials.

Former Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann is now Exhibit A for being the current poster boy about this. But I believe he is soon to very likely be replaced by someone else far more prominent than he ever was in the entire SpyGate saga.

And that person is Christopher Steele, the former MI:6 intelligence officer who compiled the dossier that ended up being used to obtain a surveillance warrant that the FBI - and others - later used to spy on the Trump campaign, transition team, and then administration.

As I discussed in my latest X22 Report column, every time Hillary Clinton’s private operatives approached federal officials with the fake Trump/Russia collusion hoaxes they had manufactured, an intricate and elaborate dance would begin to unfold.

As Perkins Coie lawyer Sussmann or Fusion GPS operatives Steele and Glenn Simpson held their key meetings with FBI and CIA personnel where they dangled the Alfa Bank thumb drives and white papers or the Steele Dossier allegations in front of them, trying oh-so-hard to get the officials they were talking with to take the ‘evidence’ from them, they would **also** labor to avoid the subject of if anyone was paying them to engage in this activity.

And if the subject came up?

Well if they subject came up, I sincerely doubt **any** of these goons suddenly threw their hands up and said “Whoa bro, you got me! I’m working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign! I probably should have been up front about that with you when I scheduled this meeting!”

“We’re trying to give you all this fake stuff we manufactured about fake Trump/Russia scandals because we’re being good citizens, and certainly not because some client who is not Hillary Clinton is paying us big money to do that!”

While thus far the only federal official I can tie Glenn Simpson to when he’s telling his Steele Dossier tall tales is the Department of Justice’s Bruce Ohr - and Ohr’s notes are still very heavily redacted and few dates appear on them, the record of contacts with federal officials is much clearer when it comes to Sussmann and Steele.

Durham’s indictment of Sussmann details the two specific approaches he made to the FBI and to “Federal Agency-2”, who everybody at this point is pretty sure is the Central Intelligence Agency.

Which Agency Did Steele Lie To?

Steele also made several approaches to multiple federal agencies that are documented. One of those agencies was, of course, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which contracted with Steele to be a confidential informant for them. It is also the agency that ended up making use of Steele’s unverified dossier allegations to obtain what is now known to have been an illegitimate surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter W. Page.

The other federal agency that Steele went to with his fake Steele Dossier stuff was the U.S. State Department.

There is an issue that arises with Christopher Steele’s approaches to these two very different federal agencies that I haven’t seen much discussion about yet in all of the years long media coverage of SpyGate. So that’s fine.

I’ll start the discussion myself.

Steele told two very different stories to the FBI and the State Department about who his primary source was for his dossier’s Trump/Russia claims. This is documented.

Steele tells the FBI the primary source for his dossier’s biggest claims is a former research assistant at the Brookings Institution named Igor Danchenko.

But then it also turns that Steele told the State Department the primary source for his dossier’s big claims were two men named Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who is a former director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, and a close Putin advisor named Vladeslav Surkov.

Vladeslav Surkov on the left, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov on the right

So…which is it? Who’s the real source for the dossier allegations? Was it Danchenko or was it Trubnikov/Surkov?

We still don’t know, but I’m pretty sure John Durham and his SCO investigators have done a deep dive into investigating that subject. But I’m not particularly interested in pursuing who it was for right now. I want to focus on something else.

When Steele tells federal officials at two different government agencies two very different stories about who he got his dossier allegations from, he’s clearly lying to one or both of them. And he can be criminally charged by the Special Counsel’s office for this.

The Exact Date That Steele Told His Lies To Federal Officials Is Important

I’ve been harping on the fact recently that the 5 year anniversary of key SpyGate dates are fast approaching. Any criminal acts that the plotters engaged in which have only a 5 year statute of limitations are going to begin arriving…and expiring…over the next several months.

Durham made it very obvious that he dropped his indictment of Michael Sussmann when he did because he was getting it unsealed ahead of the expiration of 5 year statute of limitations. The 5 year anniversary of Sussmann’s lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker on September 19, 2016 was just 3 days away when prosecutors from the Special Counsel’s Office [SCO] unsealed the indictment in federal court on September 16, 2021.

An entire flurry of key SpyGate events have their five year anniversary between the final week of October 2021 through early June of 2022.

To briefly list just 3 of them:

1. The FISA Court granting the surveillance warrant on Carter Page on October 26, 2016

2. The collection of electronic communications between members of the Trump transition team following the election, and the unmasking of the transition team member’s names, transcripts of their phone calls, text messages and emails being placed in compiled reports, and the unauthorized circulation of the classified information in those reports. This was happening all throughout the transition period, from the election to inauguration day on January 20, 2017.

3. The criminal leak of a classified transcript from an intelligence report detailing the phone conversations between President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. That leak occurred prior to January 12, which is when the classified information was published in a column by David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

So digging in here about the date issue as to when Steele lied to federal officials, the first date about his meeting with one of the federal agencies is easily learned.

It has been declassified **when** Steele told Kathleen Kavalec his dossier’s sources were Trubnikov/Surkov. There’s no mystery when he told her this at the meeting he had with her at the State Department. It was October 11, 2016.

Nothing I’m telling you here is new. This has all been known about Kavalec’s notes and Trubnikov/Surkov since May of 2019.

You’ll note that the 5 year anniversary of Steele’s meeting with Kavalec at the State Department has come and gone. October 11 was more than 2 weeks ago.

And Durham didn’t do anything. Steele wasn’t indicted for making a false statement to Kathleen Kavalec.

That’s very true. Because of two issues:

1. I don’t think Steele was lying to Kavalec about who his sources were and

2. A prosecutor who is faced with a target who has committed multiple crimes can hold his fire until he’s ready to charge the more serious ones.

Which would be more serious: Steele lying to Kavalec about working for the Clinton campaign, or Steele lying to the FBI about who his source was for the allegations the FBI ended up using for a surveillance warrant?

If you read the Kavalec notes, Steele is more clever than Sussmann was when the subject of who he was working for came up. He admits he’s making this approach as a result of investigations his private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, did for a political organization that was hacked by Russians. There is no way Kavalec did not realize Steele was referring to the DNC, and by extension, the Clinton campaign itself.

Steele actually found a way to say “I did an investigation for Hillary Clinton & the DNC after they were hacked, and I found some alarming stuff for them that I’d like to share with you” while overtly telling her he refused to **name** his client. So Steele made it clear: he was there on behalf of a client, but he would not tell her directly who it was.

Sussmann came right out and stupidly told James Baker he was there on his own and not because he was proffering the Alfa Bank thumb drives and white papers to the FBI on behalf of a client.

See the difference?

So…Steele finesses the ‘who are you working for as you are trying to hand me this stuff?’ question in a way that Sussmann didn’t. So…Durham took a look at that and saw that Steele didn’t lie about representing a client in his approach to Kavalec. He merely refused to state the client’s name directly.

What about Steele’s claim to Kavalec that the sources of his dossier were Trubnikov/Surkov? Wasn’t that a lie?

Well…likely not. For two reasons.

1. The October 11, 2016 five year anniversary came and went on October 11, 2021, and Durham didn’t charge Steele for lying to Kavalec about who his sources were and

2. The fact the October 11, 2016 date was declassified means it’s not part of any ongoing federal criminal investigation.

You know what **is** still classified and has never been publicly released? It’s been sitting right out there in the open ever since Danchenko’s name surfaced more than a year and a half ago.

**WHEN** Christopher Steele gave the FBI Igor Danchenko’s name as his PSS. THAT date is still classified.

**WHO** at the FBI did Steele first cough up Danchenko’s name to? Was is just one person or more than one person? THAT is **also** still classified.

You know why the WHEN and the WHO would still be tightly guarded information? Because it’s evidence in Durham’s continuing federal criminal investigation. The Special Counsel’s Office has **not** yet approved the public release of that information. Which is why I’ve never come across it.

It is **extremely likely** that at the time the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team frantically was throwing together it’s warrant application based on the Steele Dossier in October of 2016 - after their informant Stefan Halper failed to get either Carter Page or George Papadopoulos to say anything at all incriminating on tape throughout the summer - they **still** had not made any effort whatsoever to contact Danchenko or interview him, even though they knew who he was.

And the reason the FBI knew who Danchenko was and deliberately stayed away from him before submitting the FISA warrant to the court is going to amaze you.

That’s right. The FBI had an open investigation on Danchenko because he was suspected of being a Russian intelligence asset working undercover inside the United States. This was covered in Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 FISA Abuse Report.

CONTINUED IN PART II, COMING SOON