John Durham unmistakably puts FBI on trial
From Durham to CIA, evidence mounts FBI was warned Russia collusion story might be disinformation
From Durham to CIA, evidence mounts FBI was warned Russia collusion story might be disinformation
In one of the more dramatic exchanges during Igor Danchenko's trial on charges he lied to the FBI during the Russia collusion probe, Special Counsel John Durham confronted a lead agent with evidence he had been warned that the Russian businessman he was using as an informant might be an intelligence asset for Moscow.
Agent Kevin Helson acknowledged that a female member of the FBI's Human Intelligence Validation Unit, with two decades of intelligence experience, had raised concerns that Danchenko may be a member of the Russian military intelligence service known as the GRU, but Helson dismissed the concern.
"This is a real problem," Durham declared, as he and Helson tangled over whether the FBI should have relied on Danchenko as a confidential human source.
Helson dismissed the intelligence analyst's complaint, insisting Danchenko had provided significant help to the FBI in Russian counterintelligence analysis between 2017 and 2020, so much so that the agent had recommended the bureau compensate the Russian analyst with as much as $500,000 in payments.
In the end, Danchenko has never been charged as a Russian spy. Rather, he is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI starting when he acted as the primary source for former British spy Christopher Steele's dossier and then as a paid informant himself for the bureau. One of the charges was dismissed Friday by the trial judge, and the remaining four counts head to a jury Monday after closing arguments.
Nonetheless, Helson's performance at the trial — at times he was treated by Durham as a hostile witness — is a reminder that there is a growing body of evidence that the FBI received numerous warnings the evidence it relied upon to pursue Donald Trump for what turned out to be nonexistent Russian collusion very likely could have been tainted by a Russian disinformation campaign by Vladimir Putin's intelligence services.
And that evidence was often kept from the FISA court that allowed the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page for a full year.
In addition to the revelation of validation team warning, Helson was also forced to admit he never alerted the FISA judges that the FBI had a prior investigation into Danchenko as a possible spy for Russia back in 2008-10. Instead, the FBI falsely told the court it had no derogatory information on Danchenko.
In truth, the FBI had allegations that Danchenko tried to offer money to Americans he expected to go into the Obama administration if they would provide him classified information, Durham said. The prosecutor said that probe was improperly shut down when the FBI incorrectly concluded Danchenko had left the United States. In fact, he had not.
"There was a case on him ... It was a counterintelligence case ... an espionage case," Helson testified Thursday. The agent claimed he "couldn't see" the earlier case when he first searched the FBI database upon bringing Danchenko aboard as an informant. But he said he learned about the prior spy case within 60 days of getting started.
Durham asked whether Helson ever corrected the false statement there was no derogatory information on Danchenko. "No," the agent answered.
Kevin Brock, a retired FBI intelligence chief who wrote the bureau's confidential human source rules still in existence today, said that while it was great to see the FBI had created validation teams to assess informants, Durham's examination of Helson unmasked troubling behavior.
"I think the startling thing is that you have an agent/analyst in that validation unit pressing one of the case agents on Crossfire Hurricane on this issue of validating the information, the rumors that were present in the Steele dossier documents, and insisting that more work needed to be done," Brock said. "And she kind of got the Heisman, kind of got the stiff arm by the agent. And they really didn't do the due diligence that was necessary for such a high-profile, important case like this."
Brock said the FBI possessed significant evidence calling into question the reliability of Danchenko and the Steele dossier and withheld it from the court. "It's more than derogatory information," he said. "That's something to be worried about. And the court deserve to know that information."
The red flags and warning sirens emerged immediately in the summer of 2016 that the allegations of Trump-Russia collusion might be an intelligence disinformation campaign by Moscow or tainted by politics. In July 2016, just a few days before the FBI opened its Crossfire Hurricane investigation, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama that the Russians had intercepted a Hillary Clinton campaign adviser discussing a plan to create a narrative that Trump had a Russia problem.
The FBI knew from its first interaction with Steele in July 2016 that he was being paid and working for the Clinton campaign to create his dossier.
By September 2016 — a month before the FISA warrant was secured — the CIA warned the bureau of the Russians' knowledge about Clinton's operation against Trump.
The CIA told the FBI the Russians had intercepted a call indicating Hillary Clinton personally approved an effort "to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee."
Similar concerns were raised inside both the FBI and CIA that Steele's source network had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence, according to declassified footnotes from the Justice Department inspector general investigation into sweeping failures of the FBI in the Russia case.
"Steele's frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit," one such footnote revealed.
The CIA gave a similarly stark warning, according to another footnote.
"We identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [redacted] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele's election reporting," that footnote stated, specifically flagging a "subset of Steele's reporting" as "part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations." Further, according to the footnote, the CIA told FBI investigators that "an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia" claimed Steele's dossier was compromised by Russian intelligence "infiltrating a source into the network" used by Steele to assemble his allegations against Trump.
File
The FBI plowed ahead, never looking at the red flags in Steele's so-called "Delta file" assessing his credibility as a source or alerting the court to the validation team's concerns or the prior espionage probe involving Danchenko. Instead, Steele was offered up to $1 million from the FBI if he could prove his dossier, which he never did, according to testimony Durham elicited at the trial last week. Danchenko was recommended to receive a half-million dollars for his work, Agent Helson testified.
The portrait compiled from Durham, the DOJ IG and the declassified CIA evidence is one of the FBI turning a blind eye to the fact that there was no evidence of collusion, just a disinformation operation, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said. And the continuation of the probe for nearly three years suggests the FBI proceeded based on politics, not evidence, he added.
"Look, I don't know how you describe this $1 million payment or potential payment to Steele as anything other than what it is," Nunes told Just the News. "It was a bounty program to get Donald Trump. That's what it was plain and simple."
As for the FBI, Nunes said, "It's just so confusing to me as to why these FBI and DOJ characters and some of the Clinton cabal have not been brought up on a conspiracy charge, because clearly they were conspiring to defraud the United States government, and to lie and mislead Congress."
Brock, the former FBI boss, said the sum total of evidence now indicates the FBI failed — either by incompetence or something worse — to detect it had been played by Russian intelligence.
"This has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation run through the Hillary Clinton campaign," he said.
John Durham unmistakably puts FBI on trial alongside its Russian collusion informant
Igor Danchenko is the named defendant at this week's trial, charged with lying as an informant in the now discredited Russia collusion investigation. But with probing questions and searing redirects, Special Counsel John Durham has turned the Russian researcher's trial in the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria, Va., into an expose of stunning FBI failures and omissions in its now-infamous pursuit of Donald Trump for crimes that turned out to be nonexistent.
While the Hillary Clinton-spawned Russian collusion narrative has been the subject of a half dozen exhaustive investigations in the House, Senate and Justice Department, Durham has managed to use his third and widely assumed last trial to drop bombshell after bombshell that other inquiries failed to uncover. Even the most versed in the case have been stunned.
The effort began during pretrial motions.
Danchenko, the primary source for the now-debunked Steele dossier, was someone who had both lied to FBI agents and had troubling ties to Russian intelligence. But Durham revealed he was inexplicably hired by the bureau, despite that record, to be a paid confidential human source for three years.
Durham followed that with a stunner on day 1 of the trial, getting FBI senior analyst Brian Auten to reveal that the FBI had been unable to confirm a single fact in the Steele dossier by mid-October 2016 but nonetheless grabbed some of its most sensational claims about Trump and stuck them into a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant marked "verified" that authorized spying on the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page.
"On October 21, 2016, did you have any information to corroborate that information?" Durham asked, referring to the Carter Page FISA application submitted on that date.
"No," Auten replied.
The bureau was so desperate to find corroboration to justify Steele's allegations that it offered up to $1 million to former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, a paid researcher for Hillary Clinton's campaign, if he could corroborate his dossier. Steele did not, Auten told the jury.
That revelation even shocked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who conducted the first exhaustive probe that debunked the dossier and exposed FBI wrongdoing. Nunes told Just the News on Thursday he was never told about the $1 million payment despite subpoenaing the FBI.
But Brock said Auten's admission that the bureau submitted evidence to the FISA court that wasn't at all corroborated was even more damning under the bureau's own rules.
"If uncorroborated information is going to be used like this, FBI policy explicitly requires the swearing agent to clearly state that it is not known if the information is accurate or not," he said. "This wasn't done, and it can't be considered a mere oversight. Too many eyes all the way up the chain were laid on this affidavit. We're left with the disappointing conclusion that it was omitted on purpose."
Such revelations have even changed the minds of experts like former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy who, while critical, have tried to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt that its failures in the probe were mistakes but not corrupt behavior. Durham has now delivered "utter proof the FBI framed Trump and shielded Hunter Biden," McCarthy declared this week.
"The trial is highlighting the FBI's shocking malfeasance in the Trump-Russia 'collusion' probe," he wrote in a New York Post column this week.
The revelations of FBI failures kept coming. On day 3 of the trial, Durham used a redirect Q&A to press FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson regarding bringing on Danchenko as a confidential human source.
Durham noted that when Helson was writing a report to bring Danchenko on as a source, he had reported that there was no derogatory information about Danchenko, which wasn't accurate, since there had been a previous espionage case against him that was closed.
When Durham asked if Helson ever corrected that report, the FBI agent answered, "No."
On Wednesday, Durham got Auten to reveal he has been recommended for suspension for his role in the FBI's failure to tell the FISA court the whole truth during the probe code-named Crossfire Hurricane. Durham grilled Auten for failing to do the sort of digging an FBI analyst is assumed to do in a high-profile counterintelligence case.
"While working on Crossfire Hurricane, you were questioned as a witness in the Mueller investigation — you were in the middle of it," he said. "Did you guys even bother to pull phone records? Travel records? You did none of these things."
"Any particular reason why experienced FBI personnel could not request phone records?" Durham asked. "Ever run that number down to see phone records?"
Auten said he couldn't recall.
Durham took a mocking tone at one point on why the FBI did not challenge more aggressively the claims from Danchenko that Russian businessman Sergei Millian was a source of dirt against Trump, something that proved untrue.
"Millian was a vocal Trump supporter," Durham noted. "Would you find it peculiar that someone who was an avid Trump supporter would provide negative information about the Trump campaign? That is very peculiar, right? Almost unbelievable, wouldn't you say?"
Auten quietly agreed.
Durham signaled his intention to treat the FBI team with suspicion in one of his last pretrial motions, declaring that in "any investigation of potential collusion between the Russian Government and a political campaign, it is appropriate and necessary for the FBI to consider whether information it receives via foreign nationals may be a product of Russian intelligence efforts or disinformation."
In the end, the FBI did not seriously consider that possibility, even after the CIA warned of such possibilities and revealed Hillary Clinton's team was behind the planting of the narrative during the height of the 2016 election.
Brock said Durham has used the trial to tell a story of the FBI’s egregious failures.
“The FBI has been traditionally successful because of a simple formula: uncover facts that lead to evidence that determines an outcome,” the former FBI executive said. “Crossfire Hurricane was a debacle because it started with a desired outcome and tried to create facts to fit that outcome. Durham is methodically revealing just how desperate the politically biased Crossfire Hurricane team was.”
Nunes said the evidence Durham has now put into the public realm raises serious questions about why FBI personnel have not been prosecuted except, for one single lawyer who altered evidence submitted to the court.
“It's just so confusing to me as to why these FBI and DOJ characters and some of the Clinton cabal have not been brought up on a conspiracy charge because clearly they were conspiring to defraud the United States government to lie and mislead Congress,” he said.
Bombshell revelation of $1M offer to Steele shows FBI misled Congress on Russia probe: Kash Patel
The House Intelligence Committee under Rep. Devin Nunes sent 17 congressional subpoenas to the FBI "for information specifically related to payments and confidential human sources, were denied this information, and we learn it four years after our investigation," said the lead investigator of the panel's probe into the FBI's Russia Collusion investigation.
Following the bombshell revelation from the trial of Igor Danchenko that the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to corroborate his dossier, former House Intelligence Committee investigator Kash Patel said this proves the bureau knew it hadn't been able to verify the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and misled Congress.
Danchenko, the primary source for the Steele dossier, is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI.
As the prosecution opened its case against Danchenko Tuesday, Special Counsel John Durham questioned his first witness, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten.
Auten testified that in early October 2016, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" to provide corroborating evidence for his dossier, but the former British spy didn't provide any such information to the bureau. As a result, Steele wasn't given the money because he was unable to "prove the allegations."
An application the FBI submitted to a FISA court on Oct. 21, 2016 for a warrant to initiate electronic surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page included uncorroborated information from the dossier. Auten testified that before the FBI received the dossier, it didn't have enough evidence to obtain a FISA warrant.
Auten also said the FBI contacted other intelligence agencies regarding the specific allegations in the dossier, but none were able to corroborate them.
Durham asked Auten, "On October 21, 2016 did you have any information to corroborate that information?"
"No," Auten replied.
Patel was asked about the purported reward offer on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show Tuesday. The House Intelligence panel chaired by then-Rep. Devin Nunes sent 17 congressional subpoenas "for information specifically related to payments and confidential human sources," he said, "were denied this information, and we learn it four years after our investigation."
"That means somebody obstructed a congressional investigation with congressional subpoenas," said Patel, a former national security prosecutor.
This exposes "the depths that [the FBI] would go to to falsely corroborate the Steele dossier, which ... shows they didn't have it verified, which we've said the whole time," Patel added.
"And more importantly," he continued, "they were willing to spend a million taxpayer dollars on shoveling political hot garbage through the federal court system just to surveil a political target that would have been totally baseless — it was baseless then."
Referring to a group of senior FBI leaders during the James Comey era as "government gangsters," Patel said "this bombshell" shows that they "were so arrogant, that they said, 'Nobody is going to catch us. We are going to break a constitutional republic's 250-year tradition because we don't like the guy in the White House, and we're going to manufacture a crime on it.'"
Retired FBI supervisory special agent Bassem Youssef, one of the bureau's most famous whistleblowers, said Tuesday's revelation at the trial was unlike anything he ever saw in his three-decade FBI career.
"Never in my entire career have I heard of such an offer to pay a source to corroborate their own information," Youssef told Just the News. "The FBI queries other sources in order to validate the original source of information. It is unheard of that the FBI would offer to pay Steele $1 million to corroborate his own information.
"Obviously, the FBI was unable to validate this information through any other source that they had to resort to 'bribing' Steele to lend credibility to his own information, which the FBI knew to be inaccurate and unreliable," he added. "What a sad state of affairs in my beloved FBI."
Tech companies (incl.Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Verizon) met monthly with FBI, DHS, and other govt agencies to coordinate censorship operations during 2020 election
THIS is huge. It is a massive violation of our first amendment rights. Every one involved should be brought up on treasonous charges. You don’t get to blow up the Constitution and win.
America is over if this stands.
I am but one person with – at that time millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and they completely shut me down. Disappeared me. And they did this to everyone who opposed the party of treason.
How is this not the biggest story on the planet?
• Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
• DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
• Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.