It’s being reported this morning that John Durham has just arrested the primary researcher of the phony Steele dossier which was part of the coup to undermine or oust Trump early in his presidency:
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Christopher Steele’s dossier partner-in-crime just got arrested as part of Durham’s probe into the FBI’s role in interfering in the 2016 election on behalf of the Clinton campaign. https://t.co/IV62mHV9Iy
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— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 4, 2021
Here’s more from the NY Times:
Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.
The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.
Mr. 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 people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.
Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.
But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.
Ed Morrissey writes that until we see the indictment, which is still sealed, we won’t know much about the crime Danchenko is actually being charged with. But it could be very serious…
Until we see an indictment, the meaning of this is impossible to know. It might be just a so-called process crime, perhaps getting caught in a material lie to investigators. That’s usually as much as special counsels ever get out of their investigations.
What might make this different than the normal process-crime indictment is the discovery, first raised in Inspector General Michael Horowitz in 2019, that the Department of Justice had suspected Danchenko of being a Russian spy a decade earlier.
If this is anything more than a process crime, then Durham will need to show all of his cards pretty soon.
We’ll update you whenever we find out more about this.