Federal investigators have reportedly arrested and detained Igor Danchenko. Agents arrested the researcher who obtained information for the Steele Dossier on Thursday.
According to an indictment, Danchenko was arrested over his connection with the special counsel investigation led by John Durham, who was appointed under the Trump administration to investigate the FBI’s probe into Russian election meddling.
Danchenko is accused of lying to FBI investigators during interviews conducted from January to November 2017 as part of the bureau’s investigation into the materials included in the dossier.
He was hired by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who compiled the infamous 35-page dossier of unproven rumors and accusations about probable ties between former President Trump and Russia. Danchenko is said to have been the dossier’s chief researcher.
According to the indictment, Danchenko lied to investigators by claiming that he never discussed the charges in the Steele dossier with a specific U.S.-based individual — who had links to the Democratic Party and was at the time an executive at a public relations agency — when, in reality, he did.
Authorities claim that the analyst anonymously sourced at least one of the dossier’s allegations to that person, whose role as a contributor to the report was highly relevant and material to the FBI’s evaluation because they had ties to several people named in the dossier -including one of Danchenko’s Russian sub-sources.
Danchenko also allegedly lied to investigators about receiving an anonymous phone call in July 2016 from a person he mistook for a U.S. citizen and the head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. That individual, according to Danchenko, gave him material for the dossier, and the two eventually planned to meet in person in New York.
Authorities claimed that the phone contact never happened, that no information was exchanged between Danchenko and the anonymous individual, and that the two did not make preparations to meet in New York.
Durham has been after Danchenko for a while, issuing a subpoena for the analyst’s personal files and records from his tenure at the Brookings Institution in February. Between 2005 and 2010, Danchenko worked at the think tank.
He previously defended his involvement on the dossier, telling the New York Times in a 2020 interview that he was told to gather material for Steele and eventually delivered him evidence that triggered a “red flag.”
The Russian analyst was behind one of the Steele Dossier’s most well-known claims: that an alleged sex film of Trump with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow in 2013 existed.
During the interview with the Times last year, Danchenko said he heard reports about a possible Trump sex film at the hotel from two people, then received two more pieces of information from hotel staff that he felt matched the previous allegations.
Danchenko’s arrest comes almost two months after attorney Michael Sussman was arrested in connection with Durham’s investigation by a federal grand jury. During the 2016 campaign, he was also accused of lying to the FBI.
