Attorney General William Barr revealed Thursday that a key source in the FBI’s anti-Trump “Crossfire Hurricane” sting operation was likely a known Russian agent.
According to Barr, a previously classified footnote in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz indicated that “[t]he Primary Sub-source was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his/her documented contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers.”
Barr dropped the bombshell in a letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, as part of the effort to wrap up several ongoing cases and investigations about the intelligence community’s role in the Russia collusion hoax before the November election.
“In connection with your Committee’s investigation of these matters and ongoing hearings, you have been asking us to accelerate this process and to provide any additional information relating to the reliability of the work of Christopher Steele and the so-called ‘Steele dossier‘ as long as its release would not compromise U.S. Attorney John Durham‘s ongoing criminal investigation,” Barr explained.
Former FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify next Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham chairs.
A globalist realignment
Declassified revelations from the Russia-hoax probes have often come at a slow drip, leading to a patchwork process of stitching together the complex set of facts into a cohesive narrative.
In July, following the declassification of several IG footnotes that first shed light on the FBI’s advance knowledge of Steele’s credibility issues, media outlets including the Washington Times identified the dossier’s primary sub-source informant as Igor Danchenko, a 42-year-old lawyer and policy expert who worked for five years at the far-left Brookings Institution.
Danchenko, a native of Ukraine, was educated at both Georgetown University and Russia’s Perm University.
While his social-media accounts have since gone dark, one “about me” site directs visitors to a 2011 Persian-language blog in which Danchenko strongly advocates for improved relations between Russia and Iran.
The Obama administration’s softening of foreign policy in Iran—including the delivery of billions of dollars in bribe money to the Islamic regime—certainly complicated Russia’s global influence and trade relationships in matters like energy policy.
The assumption has been that Obama officials sought to maintain an adversarial relationship with the Vladimir Putin-led government.
But in reality, the newly declassified evidence suggests, it may have been President Donald Trump who threatened globalists’ ambitions for a geopolitical realignment that would have frozen out America’s longstanding Middle Eastern and European allies.
A win–win for corruption
That Danchenko had, himself, been the subject of a counterespionage probe indicates that he was on the FBI’s radar and that, at the very least, his pro-Russia motives should have been evident.
That he also worked for a far-left DC think-tank, advising on the same pro-Iran policies that the Obama administration seemed to be pursuing, suggests that Danchenko’s apparent involvement was more than just happenstance.
Beyond simply sowing chaos in the US election, Russia shared a common interest with Trump’s Democrat political adversaries in undermining his candidacy and presidency.
Doing so would effectively hobble any efforts to reverse US policies that the Kremlin stood to gain from—including those in Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere—even as Trump’s campaign made friendly overtures toward Putin.
Redefining the Cold War notions of a double-agent embedded with one spy ring to report its actions back to another, Steele’s sub-sources may have been double-agents actively and openly cooperating with US, Russian and other intelligence operations to pool their efforts against the Republican presidential candidate.
A duplicitous motive?
Graham, whose office publicly released the attorney general’s letter on Thursday, said he planned to follow up with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts.
He said the declassified detail provided by Barr exposed the staggering scope of “how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information” went as the FBI sought permission to spy on the Trump campaign.
While Graham praised the patriotic work from the vast majority of FBI officials, “[a] small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court,” he added.
Some remained suspicious, however, that the new wrinkle in the unfolding probe could yet be part of the cover-up.
The Conservative Treehouse blog suggested that Graham—a longtime pro-government centrist turned fervent Trump ally—might have a “duplicitous” motive in supporting the idea that Steele relied on Russian agents as his sources.
Doing so, it said, fed the narrative of plausible deniability advanced by Comey to suggest that the FBI was, itself, taken in by the disinformation.
“[A]s a consequence their investigative efforts were done under the most honorable of motives, but they were just tricked by Russians,” the blog said. “Ergo, see the Russians did interfere in the election.”
Setting the stage
Others speculated that Comey’s voluntary cooperation in the Senate hearing could signal that his former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, is poised to take the fall in Durham’s forthcoming probe.
McCabe directly oversaw the work of bad actors at the FBI including lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
After the agency was forced to cut direct ties with Steele for attempting to sell his salacious story to the radical leftist publication Mother Jones, McCabe continued to receive it using a backdoor pipeline from the firm Fusion GPS.
The dossier’s dispatches were instead transferred directly to McCabe via thumb drive, courtesy of high-ranking DOJ deputy Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie.
McCabe also was reprimanded by the IG’s office for his own conflicts of interest in refusing to recuse himself after his wife, who was running for Virginia’s state legislature, received nearly half a million dollars in campaign donations from Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton surrogate who was serving at the time as Virginia governor.
