Steele presented the dossier to the FBI, and it was part of the basis for secret surveillance court orders targeting former Trump adviser Carter Page as the FBI investigated possible ties between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Durham’s probe into that FBI investigation has also led to an indictment of a lawyer connected to Democrats, on a charge that he lied to the FBI. In addition, a former FBI lawyer who worked on the Page surveillance application later pleaded guilty to altering an email related to that case.
Trump and his supporters have accused senior FBI officials of conducting an unfair investigation into whether his campaign had ties to Russia, with little actual evidence to try to discredit or defeat him. The FBI’s defenders, however, say the agency was obligated to examine allegations of Russian interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign during the election.
Then-Attorney General William P. Barr appointed Durham in 2019 to investigate the origins and handling of the Russia investigation.
Steele’s reports on Trump were based in large part on a person he called his “primary sub-source,” which was Danchenko, according to people familiar with the matter.
Danchenko, a 43-year-old Virginia resident and Washington-based researcher, was hired by Steele to talk to people he knew in Russia about any possible ties Trump may have had to the Kremlin.
Steele, in turn, was paid by a research firm that had been hired by a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
The indictment charges that Danchenko repeatedly lied to the FBI in interviews in 2017 as agents sought to get to the bottom of claims made in the dossier. It also notes that the FBI “was ultimately not able to confirm or corroborate” most of the dossier’s substantive claims.
Danchenko allegedly lied to agents when he said he had never communicated about the dossier allegations with a U.S.-based public relations executive “who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.” In truth, that executive was “a contributor of information” to the dossier, the indictment says.
The unnamed executive’s ties to the Democratic Party were so extensive that they bore upon their “reliability, motivations, and potential bias as a source of information,” the indictment says. Danchenko “gathered some of the information . . . at events in Moscow” organized by that same executive, who invited him to attend, the indictment charges.
Danchenko is also charged with lying to the FBI about interactions he claimed to have with the then-president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. The indictment doesn’t identify that person, but people familiar with the case have previously said it is Sergei Millian.
The indictment charges that Danchenko falsely claimed to have had a phone conversation with a person he thought was Millian as part of his information-gathering for the dossier and that the two agreed to meet later in New York. “Danchenko fabricated these facts,” it alleges.
Those lies were material to the Russia investigation because chasing them down consumed a significant amount of the FBI’s time and resources, the indictment says. It adds that Danchenko’s claims “played a role in the FBI’s investigative decisions and in sworn representations that the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”
Attorneys for Danchenko did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Justice Department inspector general report was highly critical of how the FBI used Steele’s allegations. The report found that when the FBI later questioned Danchenko about the allegations contained in Steele’s dossier, Danchenko tried to distance himself from some of the claims, saying the dossier overstated the information he had originally provided to Steele.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.