Thanks to special counsel John Durham, we now know the FBI’s dossier addiction lasted four years, driving it to pay Russian Igor Danchenko to turn fiction into reality. He never could. The FBI Trump destruction quest outlasted Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry (2017-19) and nearly the Trump presidency before Mr. Danchenko stepped aside.
The novel’s villain was Mr. Trump, of course. He sat atop an enormous illegal conspiracy involving the Kremlin computer-hacking Hillary Clinton into defeat. The novel’s advance money and marketing were handled by Mrs. Clinton‘s team. They took it right to the FBI, which stood ready to do her bidding.
The FBI‘s Seventh Floor leadership, led by Director James Comey, was so determined to snare Mr. Trump it promised Mr. Steele a $1 million reward and put his unreliable source, Mr. Danchenko, on its payroll as an official confidential human source (CHS).
In deep blue D.C. and Alexandria, Mr. Durham failed twice to win “Russiagate” convictions, most recently Mr. Danchenko. A Virginia jury found him not guilty of lying to agents in 2017 debriefings that led to his FBI promotion to official CHS.
But Mr. Durham’s court filings, and FBI witnesses in Alexandria, laid out a horrible history for the once-respected FBI. It was so willing to bring down an elected president that it flashed cash in the faces of the very two people who collaborated on what turned out to be, partly or fully, Kremlin disinformation.
On that Sept. 19, 2016, day, such glee erupted inside the FBI that agents began plotting how the dossier would provide them the evidence to persuade judges to authorize wiretaps. They could then spy on Trump people incriminating themselves in texts and emails with the Russians. Off the FBI went to Rome to rendezvous with Mr. Steele, the former British spy.
Flying in from London, Mr. Steele huddled with FBI emissaries. He couldn’t validate anything. So the FBI took the next odd steps: It offered him the $1 million, a fact not known pre-Durham; and it started knowingly putting his gossip into sworn affidavits to obtain four wiretaps on campaign volunteer Carter Page. Meanwhile, it kept turning over every piece of Trump furniture to find the “extensive conspiracy” of which author Steele wrote.
Brian Auten, an FBI senior intelligence analyst assigned to the anti-Trump Crossfire Hurricane, testified at the Danchenko trial. He said that from the start of 2016, neither FBI databases nor the entire U.S. intelligence network could confirm any Steele claim.
Yet months later, Mr. Comey was so dossier-enamored that he announced to the world...
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