The Russian analyst charged with lying to the FBI about his role in the infamous “Steele dossier” was allegedly a paid confidential human source for the agency, a newly unsealed court filing revealed Tuesday.
Igor Danchenko became a paid FBI informant in March 2017 — months after the feds started questioning him over his involvement in the dossier on former President Donald Trump, according to the filing by special counsel John Durham.
Danchenko, a Russian-born lawyer living in Virginia, was arrested in November last year as part of Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation.
He pleaded not guilty to five counts of making false statements about some of the information he gave to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was paid by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign for intelligence on ties between Russia and Trump.
“From January 2017 through October 2020, and as part of its efforts to determine the truth or falsity of specific information in the Steele reports, the FBI conducted multiple interviews of the defendant regarding, among other things, the information that he had provided to Steele,” Durham said in the court filing.
“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI. The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020 … The defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”
It wasn’t clear from the court filing what information the FBI was paying Danchenko for.
In his work for Steele’s private intelligence firm, Danchenko was tasked with collecting information about Trump’s possible links to Russia — some of which was used in the since-discredited dossier.
According to Danchenko’s indictment, he lied about several of the claims — including that Russia had a tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes who were urinating on a bed where President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama had previously stayed.
Danchenko later admitted to the FBI that the scandalous detail — like much of his info in the report — was based on “rumor and speculation.”
The FBI had interviewed him several times between January and November 2017 as they attempted to vet the materials included in the dossier, but they were unable to “confirm or corroborate” most of the allegations, according to his indictment.
Durham, the special counsel, was appointed by Trump’s Justice Department in May 2019 after the president said the investigation into his purported campaign ties to Russia was a witch hunt.
