Was Danchenko Let Back Into the U.S. Due To His Anti-Trump Contracting? Or Was He Just Lucky?

Either Way, Some Serious Questions Should Be Asked By Journalists About This

“Oh you mean Steele’s primary source was **that** Igor Danchenko?! Whoops!”

There’s some highly relevant history about Danchenko that is completely left out of this indictment against him that was unsealed in a Virginia courtroom last week.

Between 2010 and 2011, when Christopher Steele hired him as a contractor for Orbis, Danchenko had left the U.S. and was now residing in the United Kingdom.

And **why** Danchenko left the US is really shocking.

Here’s the background history about Danchenko that the indictment deliberately avoids discussing: By the end of 2010 he had fled the United States while under investigation by the FBI for being a suspected Russian spy. He bolted just before the agency could get a FISA warrant on him.

The fact Danchenko was working at the Brookings Institution in 2010 when he was supposedly caught meeting with Russian intelligence officials on top of being found to have been soliciting the theft of U.S. classified information in exchange for payment and fled the country should be remarked upon more often by the mainstream press. And yet a large chunk of his backstory seems to be studiously ignored.

Excerpt from journalist Jerry Dunleavy’s news article in The Washington Examiner

Excerpt from Eric Felten’s news article at Real Clear Investigations

This suspected Russian intelligence agent makes the U.K. his home base in late 2010, traveling to Russia and back several times - at least one time with Chuck Dolan, as the indictment relates. But by 2015 he’s living openly in the U.S. again.

Which is really intriguing.

Did Christopher Steele end up using allegations fed to him by an actual Russian spy to accuse an innocent American of being…a Russian spy? It’s an interesting question for sure.

Who, if anyone, gave Danchenko the all clear signal and told him it would safe for him to return and take up residence once again inside the U.S.? How did Danchenko know, despite there being an open counterespionage case on him, that he wouldn’t be pursued if he returned? Did anyone give him assurances?

The period of time from 2015 through 2017 was full of intense media and political turmoil over narratives involving Russian interference in U.S. domestic politics. You would think a Russian foreign national who’d been investigated - inconclusively - by the FBI for being a Russian spy, who’d fled the country as a result of that investigation, suddenly popping up again in the D.C./Virginia corridor would have merited a look.

Did someone high up in all of this put out the word that while Danchenko had a problematic past, he was on the side of the angels now, since he was working with those out to sabotage the Trump candidacy for President, and so certain past events should be laid to rest? And by the time they realized Hillary hadn’t won the 2016 election, it was too late to go back?

Or was Danchenko merely incredibly lucky in rolling the dice that nobody in any of these federal counterintelligence agencies would notice his reappearance, or act on it if they did?

This is a question that any investigative journalists out there worth their salt should begin pursuing.

Another fact about Danchenko in the indictment that isn’t getting any play: he told Dolan he’d spent two years in Iran. And Dolan seemed pretty sure Danchenko was an agent of a Russian intelligence service

We’re expected to believe that the FBI’s crack Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence team wasn’t aware until close to mid-January of 2017 that the allegations they’d been using for three months in a surveillance warrant to spy on suspected Russian asset Carter Page had come from a fellow they themselves were still investigating as a possible Russian spy. I don’t think LeCarre could write fiction this good.

At any rate, I’m not buying this. But I don’t have all the information yet. We’ll have to see what Special Counsel John Durham has to say about all of this when he’s ready to talk.