today s indictment against this primary source and researcher for christopher steele s intelligence reports, this is about false statements the source allegedly made to those fbi agents working under peter strzok who were trying to track down the veracity of steele s reporting back in 2016 and 2017. the guy who was charged today is named igor danchenko. he was charged with five counts of making false statements to the fbi about his own sources for certain things that made it into steele s reporting. and whether mr. danchenko did lie to the fbi in those interviews will now be a matter for the courts. but it is also worth noting that this new indictment, just like the last one, spends little time talking about these alleged false statements and a lot of time talking about people igor danchenko came in contact with or talked to who, horror of
election that if in fact candidate trump were elected whether he or possibly members of his campaign were actively working with the russians, we needed to get to the bottom of that. we needed to get to the bottom of that. that was peter strzok, the lead investigator at the fbi who opened the fbi s crossfire hurricane investigation into the russian influence operation against the 2016 presidential election, specifically the alleged ties between trump and his campaign and that russian operation. that work included chasing down the explosive allegations that were made against trump and his campaign in a dossier of raw intelligence that was compiled by british ex-spy christopher steele and ultimately passed on to the fbi. well, today the special counsel that was tasked during the trump years by former attorney general bill barr with investigating the origins of the russia
british intelligence officer named christopher steele who had a long history of working with the fbi. these raw intelligence reports described an alleged plot being run out of the kremlin to influence the u.s. election, a plot that involved several campaign figures, allegations that the russian government had compromising information about candidate trump that they could use as leverage over him if they wanted to. all of those reports would later be published months after the election as the so-called steele dossier. in september 2016, these things were not publicly known at all. these raw intelligence reports were coming in from a trusted source and they landed at the fbi. that is how that top counterintelligence official, peter strzok, described those reports when he published a book about his experience last year. he said, quote, what was significant about the material was that it confirmed information, contours of events
and players, that we knew to be accurate and consistent with our understanding of the way putin and the russians were operating. at the same time, many other pieces of steele s information, most of them in fact, were devilishly hard to either prove or refute. but peter strzok, fbi s top counterintelligence official, he had to try. his team created a spread sheet of every statement in christopher steele s reports to try to run each one down. they attempted to identify all the confidential sources and subsources in the reports to try to analyze the quality of their intelligence and where possible to interview those sources. peter strzok himself flew to europe to meet in person with people who knew christopher steele and his work who all knew christopher steele to be diligent and truthful. this is how he sums it up in his book. in mid-2017, the end of the time i worked with the group verifying and pursuing the steele material, my sense of it remained similar to how it had stood at the beg
horrors, democrats, people who may have even supported hillary clinton s presidential campaign in 2016. the unmistakable impression is that this indictment is designed to smear christopher steele s intelligence reports as things that were deliberately made up and concocted by rascally democrats, even though none of that has to do with the actual charges against mr. danchenko. if the goal here is for this special prosecutor to try to discredit the whole russia investigation by arresting various sources for that investigation, to discredit the steele dossier because so many people have been led to think that was the reason for the investigation and to get payback to anybody involved in the russia investigation no matter how far down the chain, what do the actual investigators think about that, the people who actually carried out the trump/russia investigation itself? peter strzok, the former fbi top counterintelligence official who