(Chris Parker, Headline USA) Special Counsel John Durham confirmed yesterday that a prominent Russian businessman recently accused of lying to federal agents was paid by the FBI to act as a witness against Donald Trump.
The revelation came in Durham’s court filings yesterday, reported Just the News.
“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” his filings disclosed. “The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”
Igor Danchenko, the FBI’s Russian informant, had a history of lying or exaggerating to officials. He was also believed to have had ties to Russian intelligence previously. Danchenko denied those allegations, but later contradicted himself.
“As has been publicly reported, the defendant was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011,” Durham wrote.
“In late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.”
While the employees with whom Danchenko worked as a Russian policy expert at the far-left Brookings Institution are unnamed in the filing, it has been reported previously that he was on especially friendly terms with Fiona Hill, the British-born policy expert who would go on to testify against Trump as part of House Democrats first impeachment effort.
“According to one employee (‘Employee-1’), the defendant believed that he (Employee-1) might be in a position to enter the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information,” Durham wrote.
“During this exchange, the defendant informed Employee-1 that he had access to people who would be willing to pay money in exchange for classified information,” he continued. “Employee-1 passed this information to a U.S. government contact, and the information was subsequently passed to the FBI.”
According to the filing, the FBI then launched a “preliminary investigation” into Danchenko.
The agency launched a full investigation “after learning that the defendant (1) had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and (2) had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers,” Durham noted.
Still, the FBI continued to pay Danchenko until he was found to have lied to federal agents earlier this year. He now faces trial for five counts of lying to the bureau.
After being introduced by Hill to ex-British MI6 spy Christopher Steele, Danchenko would go on to act as the “primary sub-source” in the series of dubious opposition-research reports commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Trump, her Republican rival in the 2016 election.
The often salacious allegations in the now-debunked dossier were deliviered via secret back-channels to the FBI, which then leaked them to the media after opening its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. The media, in turn, used the FBI investigation as justification to disseminate the reports publicly, presenting them as factual documents, in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R.-Fla, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted that it “found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government” while discovering “deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing.”
Democrat politicians and the mainstream media have fiercely denied the allegations against the FBI.
“You are dead wrong, Senator. The report shows extensive evidence of collusion between the Trump Campaign & the Russians. Read the report,” tweeted former CIA director John O. Brennan.
“Criticizing FBI investigative efforts while ignoring the political corruption of Donald Trump & his cronies is shameful,” Brennan claimed.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
