Latest developments of the investigation by special prosecutor John Durham on the origins of Russiagate, which involved Donald Trump both as a candidate and as president.
In short, from documents filed in court a week ago by Durham, we learned that the FBI enlisted and paid as informant Igor Danchenko, the main source of the Steele dossier, a forgery commissioned by the Clinton Campaign to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion case, despite having investigated Danchenko himself for alleged spying on behalf of the Russian government.
Even after discovering the identity of the primary source of the dossier, instead of immediately verifying whether Danchenko had used it to convey Russian disinformation, the FBI paid and covered him as a source for over three years.
Durham's work is in the pipeline. The special prosecutor could deliver his final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland by the end of the year, without further indictment.
Today we know that the anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British agent Christopher Steele was the work of the Clinton Campaign. That the FBI knew the unreliability of sources, but nevertheless used it as the main piece of evidence in its requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to obtain authorization to spy on the Trump Campaign and the transition team.
The only collusion in the Russiagate case is that between the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign (Hillary Clinton) on the one hand and the police and intelligence apparatus of the current Democratic administration (Obama-Biden), in order to designate Republican opposition presidential candidate Donald Trump as a Kremlin puppet.
An operation that did not end on election day, limiting itself to being one of the many low blows from the election campaign. No, it has been pushed much further, to the point of forcing Trump to rule for over two years under the threat of investigation by Special Attorney Mueller, undermining his presidency and disseminating false preconditions for his removal. An attempted coup, in essence.
Attorney Durham revealed that the FBI had listed Igor Danchenko, the main source of the bogus Steele file, on its payroll as a confidential human source. A relationship that lasted from March 2017 to October 2020,coincidentally for the duration of the Trump administration.
A period that includes: most of the surveillance requests authorized by the FISC; the Mueller investigation, which nevertheless failed to notice that Danchenko had lied to the FBI; the report by the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the conduct of the FBI in the Trump investigation, in which, however, there is no hint that Horowitz was told that Danchenko was on the Bureau's payroll.
In short, the FBI hid the role of Danchenko, the most important source of the false accusations against Trump contained in the dossier, from the judges who had to decide if there were justified reasons to spy on the former president and his collaborators, and omitted from two official investigations.
But the investigation by Prosecutor Durham also reveals something else. The FBI did not question Danchenko before using the Steele file in its first two sworn requests for surveillance, in October 2016 and January 2017.
And when it decided to question Danchenko, failing to corroborate Steele's allegations despite having already used them in court, instead of warning the FISC judges that there were good reasons for believing the dossier information on Trump, then president in office, to be unreliable, the FBI continued to rely on that suspicious information in subsequent sworn requests for surveillance, on the basis of which the FISC granted further warrants.
But it gets worse. Not only did Durham prove that Danchenko lied several times to the FBI and the FBI continued to cover him as a source and pay him anyway. Not only did the FBI use information from Steele and Danchenko, which they knew to be unreliable and biased, to suggest to a court that the president of the United States could be a Russian asset. The FBI was also in possession of information indicating that Danchenko himself could have been a Russian asset.
Evidence presented by Durham suggests that the FBI, far from being a victim, from being deceived by the lies of the defendants, rather acted as an accomplice, through willful misconduct or negligence, in the Clinton Campaign operation to fabricate the Russiagate hoax and portray Trump as a Kremlin agent.
References:
https://nypost.com/2022/09/18/john-durhams-final-act-exposing-the-fbi/
