Meet the Steele Dossier's 'Primary Subsource': Fabulist Russian From Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy

[PeteS in CA]

Meet the Steele Dossier's 'Primary Subsource': Fabulist Russian From Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/24/meet_steele_dossiers_primary_subsource_fabulist_russian_at_us_think_tank_whose_boozy_past_the_fbi_ignored_124601.html

The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele, according to congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Agents continued to use the dossier as grounds to investigate President Trump and put his advisers under counter-espionage surveillance.

The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records.

[Victoria33]

Steele worked as an undercover agent for MI6 for many years in Russia and had contacts there.  The opposition research company that hired Steele for background info. on Trump, was the same company the Republicans used for background research on candidates. 

[PeteS in CA]

Steele worked as an undercover agent for MI6 for many years in Russia and had contacts there.  The opposition research company that hired Steele for background info. on Trump, was the same company the Republicans used for background research on candidates.

How does that change the fact that the "Steele Dossier" was largely drunken barroom gossip supplied by a drunk who was paid by the Clinton Campaign?

And how does that change the fact that the FBI either knew the "Dossier" was unreliable partisan-paid gossip or knew they had not verified the contents, and on either count was utterly wrong to deceptively manipulate what was said to Trump in supposed briefings that were in fact spy sessions?

There was no justification for spying on Trump. There was no justification for the FISA warrants against Trump Campaign team members. There was no justification for trying to entrap Trump's foreign adviser Flynn. There was no justification for the Mueller shamvestigation happening. All this @#$% was based on the "Steele Dossier" that the FBI knew was almost entirely unverified and at some point also learned was partisan-paid drunken barroom gossip.

There was no point at which the FBI was justified in taking the actions they did against the Trump Campaign - not the spying, not the FISA warrants, not the attempt to entrap Flynn, not the Mueller shamvestigation.

[PeteS in CA]

Steele worked as an undercover agent for MI6 for many years in Russia and had contacts there.  The opposition research company that hired Steele for background info. on Trump, was the same company the Republicans used for background research on candidates.

@Victoria33:

Sidney Blumenthal blunders in attack on GOP senator, requiring factual correction

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/just-security-deletes-sentence-blumenthal-article-adds

An article by journalist and Democratic political operative Sidney Blumenthal critical of GOP Sen. Ron Johnson has been amended to remove a sentence that stated the Washington Free Beacon was involved in hiring Steele dossier author Christopher Steele, following an inquiry by Just the News.

The now deleted sentence in the JustSecurity.org story reads: "Steele was in fact initially hired by the conservative website The Free Beacon and paid by Republican donor Paul Singer to help the Jeb Bush campaign."
...
The center responded with an email that stated the sentence had been stricken from the article and that an editor's note had been appended to the story.

The editor's note reads: "This article originally referred to the Free Beacon’s hiring Steele, which is an error."

In addition, the note points out that the Associated Press previously made a similar error and includes the wire service's correction. 

"As the Associated Press stated in a correction to its reporting, 'The Associated Press erroneously reported that a former British spy’s work on an opposition research project was initially funded by the conservative Washington Free Beacon. Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it.' "

The Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to do research on the various R candidates. That contract was ended before the Clinton Campaign and DNC hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump, which led to Fusion GPS hiring Christopher Steele.

In other words, the Washington Free Beacon did not contribute to what Christopher Steele produced.

[Victoria33]

@PeteS in CA

I followed this from the time it began with Steele.

Yes, it was a man at Fusion GPS who hired Steele to do opposition research on Trump and Republicans also used Fusion GPS for opposition research.  Steele was chosen due to his work at British MI6, as he worked for them undercover in Russia for years and knew "people" there.  Steele also had a good reputation with our FBI as they had used his information before and it was reliable.  When he got the info. from Russians sources, he was concerned about the sexual info., and went to one FBI official he had worked with before, gave him all the information and asked the man to determine if the sexual part of the info. was true.

[PeteS in CA]

@PeteS in CA

I followed this from the time it began with Steele.

Yes, it was a man at Fusion GPS who hired Steele to do opposition research on Trump and Republicans also used Fusion GPS for opposition research.  Steele was chosen due to his work at British MI6, as he worked for them undercover in Russia for years and knew "people" there.  Steele also had a good reputation with our FBI as they had used his information before and it was reliable.  When he got the info. from Russians sources, he was concerned about the sexual info., and went to one FBI official he had worked with before, gave him all the information and asked the man to determine if the sexual part of the info. was true.

I guess you missed this, concerning the FBI's trust of Steele, https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/09/13-things-to-look-for-in-the-inspector-general-fisa-abuse-report/ :

8. Other Information Questioning Steele’s Reliability
The FISA applications also maintained that the FBI had determined Steele to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their source, but Kavalec’s memorandum showed that Steele was not reliable. In her meeting notes, Kavalec wrote that Steele claimed “the Russians had constructed a ‘technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election’ that recruited emigres in the United States to ‘do hacking and recruiting,’” and that “payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami.” But Kavalec’s notes corrected Steele’s “intel,” by stressing: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

And this, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446050-did-brits-warn-about-steeles-credibility-before-muellers-probe-congress :

Multiple witnesses have told Congress that, a week before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Britain’s top national security official sent a private communique to the incoming administration, addressing his country’s participation in the counterintelligence probe into the now-debunked Trump-Russia election collusion.

Most significantly, then-British national security adviser Sir Mark Lyall Grant claimed in the memo, hand-delivered to incoming U.S. national security adviser Mike Flynn’s team, that the British government lacked confidence in the credibility of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s Russia collusion evidence, according to congressional investigators who interviewed witnesses familiar with the memo.

Also about this, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/susan-rice-received-memo-from-british-warning-them-about-dossiers-reliability-flynn-team-alleges-in-bombshell-filing :

According to the filing, which was unsealed with light redactions, a letter was "delivered by the British Embassy to the incoming National Security team after Donald Trump’s election, and to outgoing National Security Adviser Susan Rice" that "apparently disavows former British Secret Service Agent Christopher Steele, calls his credibility into question and declares him untrustworthy."

And possibly more, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/i-cant-tell-you-yet-lindsey-graham-says-feds-were-warned-about-christopher-steele-up-to-six-times :

"There's four events that I'm aware of — five actually — where the system was informed that Christopher Steele was an unreliable informant when it came to Trump. That he had a political bias and agenda. That on five different occasions, the system, for lack of a better word, was told, 'Be wary of this guy,'" the South Carolina Republican said.

"Some of them I can't tell you yet until we get this stuff declassified. But I think it's going to be five; it may be six," Graham said, adding that he wants to put together a chart showing the timeline of when "the system" received warnings and any efforts by the DOJ and the FBI to verify the dossier. ...

And again, the Washington Free Beacon's contract with Fusion GPS was over before the Clinton Campaign and DNC hired Fusion GPS, and before Fusion GPS hired Steele for the Clinton-DNC contract. Why keep dragging in that irrelevancy?