Key Contributor to Democratic Probe of Trump’s Russian Connections Arrested
Igor Danchenko was indicted as part of the ongoing Durham investigation to find any wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia investigation.
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Igor Danchenko, a key contributor to the Democratic-funded Steele dossier, which collected together rumors and unproven assertions that the Trump 2016 campaign was compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence to win the election against Hillary Clinton, has been arrested and charged with lying to the FBI, reports the New York Times. A grand jury indictment accused Danchenko of five counts of making false statements to the F.B.I. about his sources for certain claims in the dossier. While Danchneko’s defense lawyer tried to enter a plea of not guilty before a Virginia magistrate judge, the judge said that was premature before releasing him on bond.
The indictment said Danchenko falsely told the FBI that he had not discussed the claims in the dossier, a series of reports written by Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, with a public relations executive with strong ties to the Democratic Party. However, the executive, whose description matched the career of Charles Dolan Jr., the state chairman of the Clinton-Gore campaigns in Virginia in 1992 and 1996 and a State Department appointee in the Bill Clinton administration, was a source for some of the claims, including gossip about the ouster of Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign chairman. The indictment linked Dolan to Danchenko in several other ways, including a lunch in Moscow in 2016. The other four false-statement charges concern allegedly false claims made by Danchenko to the FBI about purported interactions with Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, as a potential source for the dossier. The indictment did not accuse Danchenko of working for Russian intelligence.
