Feds Arrest Analyst Tied to Salacious Steele Dossier

Igor Danchenko (LinkedIn) / Donald Trump (Alex Wong, Getty)

An analyst tied to the salacious and unverified Steele dossier – which was a basis for monitoring former Trump adviser Carter Page over concerns about ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia – was arrested on Thursday, according to The New York Times.

Igor Danchenko “was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton,” the Times wrote.

The Steele dossier was written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Its unverified allegations were published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office. Danchenko worked for Steele and in 2017 was interviewed by the FBI.

According to the Times:

The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.

A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.

The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.

Danchenko’s arrest is part of the special counsel investigation by John Durham, who since April 2019 has been looking into the origins of the Department of Justice’s Trump-Russia probe.