A key source for the salacious Trump-Russia dossier was acquitted by a federal jury Tuesday, in a case that raised more questions about the FBI’s handling of its probe into the 45th president’s 2016 campaign.
The panel cleared Igor Danchenko of four counts of lying to the bureau following approximately 10 hours of deliberation across two days after the case judge dropped a fifth count against him last week.
The verdict was the second acquittal at trial in a case brought by special counsel John Durham in connection with the conduct of the FBI counterintelligence probe nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Despite Danchenko’s acquittal, the trial produced several bombshells about the investigation — including testimony from a FBI analyst that the bureau had offered Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the file, $1 million in October 2016 to make its outrageous claims against Trump stick.
The dossier, which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, purported to document Trump’s tight ties with Moscow and lay out possible ways the Kremlin could blackmail him. It may be best remembered for the claim that the future president paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room where then-President and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama had slept.
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Danchenko, by his own admission, was responsible for 80% of the raw intelligence in the dossier — which was commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — and half of the accompanying analysis.
The information in the file was later used by federal investigators as evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant targeting Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In Durham’s lone investigative success, a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to falsifying documents in order to get the warrant renewed.
The dossier was later publicly disavowed at the highest levels of the FBI, with the bureau’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, telling lawmakers in November 2020 he would not have approved the warrant application had he known the information in the file was inaccurate.
Former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was convicted of a single count of lying to the FBI back in May.
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