Durham Witness Drops Trial Bombshell: FBI Offered Steele $1M to Prove Dossier Claims

I n my posts Tuesday on the start of the Igor Danchenko trial (here and here), I observed that “no matter how the case plays out, the most notable evidence will be about the behavior of the FBI, not the defendant.” Just one day in, we are already seeing why.

The FBI offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million if he could corroborate the claims in the now-infamous anti-Trump dossier. As reported by the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy, the admission about the offer was made by Brian Auten, an FBI senior intelligence analyst who was the first witness called by special counsel John Durham in Danchenko’s false-statements trial.

The Steele dossier, for which Steele’s associate Danchenko was the “principal source,” portrayed then–GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as enmeshed in a corrupt “conspiracy of cooperation” with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. The dossier further claimed that Trump was compromised by, among other things, a recording of lewd sexual behavior that was supposedly in the Kremlin’s possession. Neither Steele nor Danchenko was ever able to corroborate the dossier allegations. Moreover, Durham’s court filings in the Danchenko case indicate that the “pee tape” claim was a complete fabrication.

Because proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are classified and ex parte — meaning only the FBI and Justice Department appear before FISC judges, and there is no notice or discovery ever provided to Americans who are monitored under the court’s warrants — the government has a higher legal obligation than in normal criminal proceedings to ensure that the information presented to the court has been verified.

It is thus breathtaking that the FBI would offer an informant $1 million to corroborate his allegations — which is tantamount to an admission that the information is not even supported, much less verified — and yet rely on that unverified and likely false information, not once but four separate times over the course of a year, under oath in applications to the FISC.

Just as remarkable: Danchenko was Steele’s principal source for the dossier, yet the FBI did not interview him until late January 2017. By that time, the bureau had relied on the dossier information twice (in October 2016 and January 2017) in sworn applications to the FISC that limned Trump — the GOP candidate for the presidency, and then the sitting president — as a tool of the Russian government. The purpose of interviewing Danchenko was to determine whether the Steele allegations were true or false. Obviously, the FBI is supposed to determine that the information has been verified before making an application to the FISC in the first place.

Moreover, the FBI rationalizes that it needed to turn to Danchenko because it had a falling-out with Steele over his leaking to the media around the time of the 2020 election. Put aside that Steele was giving the press information well before that, and that the FBI had every reason to know it. Steele was a paid FBI informant. The bureau had every right to ask Steele exactly who his sources were, and Steele would have had an obligation to provide that information. Yet the FBI relied on Steele even though it was well aware that he was not an eyewitness to anything he was reporting — he was relying on second- and third-hand accounts from a supposed “network” of sources.

That is, the FBI did not seek to interview these sources before portraying the president of the United States as a Russian asset. The bureau depended solely on Steele, notwithstanding that agents knew his anti-Trump bias was virulent and his information was uncorroborated — hence, the $1 million offer, which the FBI knew it hadn’t had to pay because Steele was unable to support his claims.

It turned out, furthermore, that Steele’s network was, in essence, Danchenko. When they finally got around to interviewing Danchenko after obtaining the first and second surveillance warrants, he made clear to FBI agents that Steele’s information was unverified rumor and innuendo. Yet, far from going back to the FISC to correct the record, as was its legal obligation, the FBI doubled down — continuing to rely on Steele/Danchenko information, under oath, in warrant applications granted by the FISC in April and June 2017.

The bureau also continued, even after interviewing Danchenko, to stoke the public impression that then-President Trump was in a corrupt conspiracy with the Kremlin, because of which it was foreseeable that criminal charges could be brought. On March 17, 2017, the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, told a congressional committee in public testimony:

I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed. [Emphasis added.]

As noted yesterday, Durham himself has been questioning Auten at the trial.

Auten was among a team of FBI agents who interviewed Steele in Rome in October 2016. In the course of that meeting, Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz has found, one of the FBI agents provided Steele with unauthorized disclosures of classified information regarding the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (the bureau’s code name for the Trump–Russia probe). At the time, as the FBI knew, Steele had been retained by a private intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, to compile anti-Trump research. In turn, Fusion had been retained by the Clinton campaign through its lawyer, Mark Elias. Steele clearly communicated what he learned from the FBI to Fusion, and the information was duly passed along to the Clinton campaign, which aggressively depicted Trump as a “Putin puppet.”

No one has been charged with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. As Dunleavy has previously reported, Auten acknowledged to Horowitz that one of the Crossfire Hurricane case agents had provided too much information to Steele at the October 2016 meeting.

Auten was present when the FBI first interviewed Danchenko in January 2017. IG Horowitz’s summary of the doubts about Steele raised by this session has to be read to be believed:

[Danchenko] told the FBI that [he] had not seen Steele’s reports until they became public that month [in a report by Buzzfeed], and that [he] made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting. For example, [Danchenko] told the FBI that, while [Steele’s dossier] Report 80 stated that Trump’s alleged sexual activities at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow had been “confirmed” by a senior, western staff member at the hotel, [Danchenko] explained that [he] reported to Steele that Trump’s alleged unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz Carlton hotel was “rumor and speculation” and that [Danchenko] had not been able to confirm the story. A second example provided by the Primary Sub-source was Report 134’s description of a meeting allegedly held between [former Trump campaign adviser] Carter Page [the specific target of the surveillance warrant] and Igor Sechin, the President of Rosneft, a Russian energy conglomerate. Report 134 stated that, according to a “close associate” of Sechin, Sechin offered “PAGE/ TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 percent (privatized) stake in Rosneft” in return for the lifting of sanctions against the company. [Danchenko] told the FBI that one of [his] subsources furnished information for that part of Report 134 through a text message, but said that the sub-source never stated that Sechin had offered a brokerage interest to Page. We reviewed the texts and did not find any discussion of a bribe, whether as an interest in Rosneft itself or a “brokerage.”

Auten wrote a memo analyzing Danchenko’s undermining of Steele’s reporting. Yet the FBI did not share this memo with the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence, which oversees applications to the FISC, much less with the court itself.

Far from correcting the record, the FBI represented to the FISC in the April and June 2017 sworn surveillance-warrant applications that it had met with Danchenko (described as “the primary sub-source”) in “an effort to further corroborate Steele’s reporting.” The bureau asserted that it had found Danchenko to be “truthful and cooperative.” Of course, to the extent he had been truthful and cooperative, it was in confirming the FBI’s suspicions that Steele’s allegations were bogus. . . . But the bureau withheld that embarrassing concession. Worse, what it did say would lead any sensible person — particularly one who assumed that the FBI was acting lawfully and honorably — to infer that Danchenko had corroborated Steele’s claims, when the opposite was true.

Remarkably, the FBI did proceed to sign Danchenko up as a paid intelligence source, a status in which he was kept for over three years. It is not yet clear whether this maneuver made it more difficult for Horowitz, Durham, and Congress to investigate the FBI’s performance.

It gets worse, if that’s possible. Following the IG’s report, FBI director Christopher Wray referred Auten to the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility for an investigation and possible discipline. Yet, despite being under this inquiry, Auten was tapped by the bureau, in the stretch run of the 2020 election, to provide an intelligence assessment of derogatory information about the lucrative overseas business dealings of Hunter Biden and the Biden family — in the main, information that had been gathered by Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.). As I’ve previously recounted, Auten’s assessment was used to dismiss the Biden data as “Russian disinformation” — which it clearly was not.

Igor Danchenko may well have lied to the FBI about two of his sources, as Durham has alleged. That is the focal point of the ongoing trial, but it is trivial compared to what the trial, in conjunction with information gathered during other investigations, is telling us about the FBI.