Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution employee and one-time suspected Russian spy, has been acquitted of four charges of lying to the FBI about his sources for the fraudulent Steele Dossier.
Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution employee and one-time suspected Russian spy, has been acquitted of four charges of lying to the FBI about his sources for the fraudulent Steele Dossier. The ragtag collection of memos, fabulist brainstorming, and fake news about peeing Russian hookers was used to frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset.
The report caused great division among the Republicans in the 2016 election. It teed up the years-long Mueller investigation, which was more about dirtying up Trump for the 2020 election than seeking the truth. Evidence and testimony in Danchenko’s trial make plain how the Russian collusion investigation was more cover-up than investigation. Hillary Clinton’s campaign got the Trump-is-a-Russian-spy fake news rolling, but it bears noting that she was the one relying on Russian assets to do her dirty work.
This case likely ends the active special counsel investigation into the origins of the fake Russia collusion narrative seized upon by its authors and disseminators: anti-Trump apparatchiks in the FBI, the CIA, the Democrat Party, and their willing handmaidens in the Fourth Estate. Special counsel John Durham is widely expected to put all of his findings — and they are damning — into a report whose ending likely was punctuated by Tuesday’s verdict.
