I've spent a lot of time since 2016 on the Russia Collusion story. It is not just interesting in, and of, itself. It is the key to understanding the past decade. This is my summary of the story as I understand it now, which is much different from 2016 and early 2017 when I did not know what to think, other than it was at least possible that Trump or the Trump campaign might have acted in concert with the Russians.
I will try to be careful in what follows to distinguish what I feel confident about in the narrative versus things that I believe occurred, but are based upon my speculation.
You can find elsewhere references to my source materials but they include the two DOJ Inspector General reports (aka the Horowitz Reports), the reports of Special Counsels Durham and Mueller. The Carter Page FISA application and its three renewals, the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Interference with the 2016 Presidential Campaign, the hundreds of pages of the Peter Strzok - Lisa Page texts, the Confidential Human Source transcript of conversations with George Papadopolous, and the more than 5,000 pages of transcripts of 53 witnesses interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee in 2017-18. I am confident I've read more of the source materials than the Pulitzer Prize winning influencers at the New York Times and Washington Post who were simply taking bits and pieces from their sources to construct stories consistent with predetermined narratives that would please their readers.
Not covered is the hacking
IC v Steele FBI
Before going back to the starting point I want to
According to the Durham Report an FBI review conducted in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report". The FBI Review team was then told by Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Dina Coris that "no more memorandum were to be written" and a further meeting held in which "the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny".
Corsi then directed the Review team not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum. Team members described this as "highly unusual" because analysis is what analysts do. An Office of General Counsel Attorney at the briefing "remembered being shocked" by Corsi, stating "it was the most inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at the FBI". This was occurring at a time when the Mueller investigation was in full swing, continuing to generate media accusations against Trump, and when the Steele Dossier was still considered a reputable source. The FBI and Special Counsel Mueller failed to inform the public about this in 2018 and also in the following year when the Special Counsel's report was issued. The public only became aware of this information with the release of the Durham Report in 2023.
The Durham Report concluded, "Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated" (1)
December 2016 the FBI analysts realized that Steele's major sub-source was Igor Danchenko. Upon further investigation they were startled and worried. It turned out Danchenko had been the subject of a still-open counterespionage investigation by the Baltimore office of the FBI! It also turned out that Danchenko, identified as a Russian national living in Russia was, in fact, a Russian national, but he had been living in the U.S.
Danchenko figureds made by fellow employees at the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, that he told them if they got jobs in the Obama administration he would pay them for information. Upon investigation, the FBI determined that Danchenko had been in contact with known FSB (Russian intelligence) officers in the U.S. (1)
After leaving Brookings, Danchenko worked at a Virginia based-venture capital firm) but in 2014 it declared bankruptcy. At the time, the firm was sponsoring Danchenko's visa application to remain in the U.S.
Danchenko reached out to an ethnic Russian acquaintance who ran Virginia based IT staffing firm, who said he'd hire and sponsor Danchenko if someone else paid his salary, which Steele agreed to do. "Danchenko Employer was merely a front to allow Danchenko to continue his work on behalf of Orbis [Steele's firm], while at the same time allowing him to secure a work visa through alleged employment with a U.S. based company". His employer described Danchenko as "boastful . . . having low credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts with the Kremlin".
Dachenko was being paid somewhere between 3 and 5K a month by Orbis. In addition from January 2016 to June 2021 Danchenko received over $436,000 in wire transfers from European businesses, including Orbis.
In March 2017, Igor Danchenko was made a Confidential Human Source (CHS) by the FBI, despite his statements in January disavowing any ability to corroborate the allegations he was the source of in the Steele Dossier. Over the next three years he would be paid $220,000 by the Federal government as a CHS and, when the Mueller investigation started in May, his CHS status was transferred to that unit. The net result was to make it difficult for any outsider to identify Danchenko as a source.
The paperwork regarding Danchenko's CHS status "incorrectly noted that there was no derogatory information associated with Danchenko and that he had not been a prior subject of an FBI investigation" which was incorrect. When questioned later by the Durham team no one at the FBI could describe what Danchenko provided for the monies he was paid.
It was only in May 2019, after release of the Mueller Report, that the FBI Validation Management Unit raised questions about Danchenko including the past investigation, and several falsehoods and inconsistencies in his visa applications and immigration documents. That prompted FBI HQ to, for the first time, reach out to the Baltimore office, which had conducted the earlier (and still open) counterintelligence investigation of Danchenko. The agent in charge of the Baltimore investigation "expressed disbelief when she first learned that Danchenko had been signed up as an FBI source because, among other things, the FBI had not resolved the prior counterespionage case".
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(1) One retort to the failure to
verify any of the Steele Dossier's substantive allegations is to claim, "well, the Russia collusion story is about much more than the Steele Dossier".
Actually, it's not. Virtually every part of the alleged collusion is
referenced in the various reports contained with the Dossier (which
consists of reports issued from June through September of 2016). The
only significant incidents not covered in the Dossier are the
Papadopolous-Mifsud meetings in the spring of 2016, which proved to be a
dry hole once investigators probed it and the Trump Tower NYC meeting in
June 2016 (for the details on that fiasco read this). We also have crazy Roger Stone and his
pathetic partner, Jerome Corsi, desperately trying to get information
from Wikileaks in the summer of 2016 but (1) they never got it, and (2)
if the Trump campaign was colluding with the Kremlin who supposedly were behind the leaks, why couldn't they
get it directly from the Russians?
