https://news.sky.com/story/russia-p...attack-british-troops-in-afghanistan-12016425 Russia paid Taliban fighters to attack British troops in Afghanistan The group responsible for the payments is the same Russian intelligence outfit behind the Skripal poisonings, Sky News is told.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-got-angry-if-warned-about-russia-so-officials-avoided-2020-7 Trump flew into a rage every time US intelligence warned him about Russia, so officials gave up briefing him on it, report says President Donald Trump would blow up at briefers who tried to tell him about Russia's malign actions towards the US, according to CNN. Multiple sources said this created a chilling effect, leading him to hear less and less about Russian threats and bolstering his belief in Putin's good intentions. Top security and intelligence officials denied the reports that Trump is unfavorable towards receiving intelligence about Russia. Business Insider has approached the White House for comment. President Donald Trump was briefed less and less with warnings about Russia's behavior towards the US because he would get angry when presented with intelligence about it, a CNN report said. Early in his presidency, officials learned to limit their verbal briefings on the topic and would often see their written materials ignored, according to multiple former White House officials cited in the report from CNN's Jim Scuitto. "The President has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn't favorable to Russia," one former senior national security staffer told CNN. The current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe — who started in May — and National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien both denied the accounts. They nonetheless have renewed relevance to a New York Times report that Taliban-linked bounty killings, sponsored by Russia, resulted in the deaths of US soldiers. Three separate Taliban sources corroborated these claims to Mitch Prothero for Business Insider on Wednesday. The Associated Press (AP) reported on Monday that intelligence officials knew, and had briefed the president on them, as far back as 2019. CNN's report about the president's attitude to intelligence warnings on Russia now offers a potential alternative explanation. The CNN report said that at the start of his presidency, Trump often flew into a rage at briefers who attempted to tell him about hostile Russian activity towards the US, including political interference. CNN's cited multiple former officials for that detail. They soon learned, according to the report, not to highlight Russia in their briefings. In many cases, oral briefings on Russia would be avoided altogether and left in the president's lengthy written briefings, which he often did not read, according to CNN. It left officials with difficult decisions on how to prioritize the most crucial information, CNN reported. One former senior intelligence said their policy became to "save it for when it matters." This led to what one former senior National Security Council official described as "a self-fulfilling prophecy," in which the less Trump heard of Russian activity, the less he believed that Vladimir Putin could mean the US harm, CNN said. Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, told CNN in a statement that this was "totally false." O'Brien said that the claims were "ridiculous" and only backed up the White House claims that the intelligence was not reliable enough to pass on, CNN reported. CNN's report is also in line with Trump's well-documented deference towards Putin despite warnings. As one former US ambassador to Russia put it in a tweet on Wednesday, Trump "always sides with Putin." Business Insider has approached the White House for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/roger-stone/614068/ Stone Walks Free in One of the Greatest Scandals in American History The amazing thing about the saga is how much of it happened in the full light of day. Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class-twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a Klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile-away goofball—who could take him seriously? Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect of people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight. Stone could not have been more different. He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss. Bank robbers don’t go on Twitter to announce, “Hey, I’m going to rob a bank, sorry, not sorry.” Or so you’d expect. Yet Stone is the central figure in the greatest scandals in U.S. history. Ames, Hanssen, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss—none of them worked with a foreign intelligence service to help a candidate for president of the United States. Stone did. And now he will receive a commutation of his sentence from the president he served. The amazing thing about the Trump-Stone story is how much of it happened in the full light of day. A (very) partial timeline: On August 4, 2016, Stone told listeners to a paid conference call that Julian Assange would continue to release information “that is going to roil this race.” On August 8, he told a Republican group that he had been in contact with Assange, and more drops were coming. On August 14, Stone began Twitter direct messaging with the Russian unit that hacked the emails, and then soon after posted the messages on his website, Stone Cold Truth. On August 21, he tweeted: “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel,” evidently referencing the then-forthcoming cache of emails phished by Russian intelligence from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. On October 2, a Sunday, he tweeted that the next WikiLeaks dump would come on Wednesday. When Wednesday came and went with no dump, Stone tweeted, “Libs thinking Assange will stand down are wishful thinking. Payload coming #Lockthemup.” Stone reaffirmed his prediction on Thursday. The dump came Friday, October 7. Stone was simultaneously in communication with the Trump campaign and the candidate Donald Trump. The former Trump deputy campaign chair Rick Gates testified at Stone’s trial in November 2019 that he witnessed Trump take a call from Stone after the first WikiLeaks release in July. Less than a minute after the call ended, Trump told Gates that another release would follow later in the campaign. Trump declared in writing to the Mueller investigation that he did not recall discussing WikiLeaks with Stone. On page 77 of Volume II of the report, Mueller expressed disbelief in Trump’s sworn evidence: “Witnesses said that Trump was aware that Roger Stone was pursuing information about hacked documents from WikiLeaks at a time when public reports stated that Russian intelligence officials were behind the hacks, and that Trump privately sought information about future WikiLeaks releases.” On page 17 of Volume II, the report cites the former Trump attorney Michael Cohen as one of those witnesses, along with Gates. It is not illegal for a U.S. citizen to act or attempt to act as a go-between between a presidential campaign and a foreign intelligence agency, and Stone was not charged with any crime in conjunction with his Trump-WikiLeaks communications. But it’s a different story for the campaign itself. At a minimum, the Trump campaign was vulnerable to charges of violating election laws against receiving things of value from non-U.S. persons. Conceivably, the campaign could have found itself at risk as some kind of accessory to the Russian hacks—hacking being a very serious crime indeed. So it was crucial to the Trump campaign that Stone keep silent and not implicate Trump in any way. Which is what Stone did. Stone was accused of—and convicted of—lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks matter. Since Stone himself would have been in no legal jeopardy had he told the truth, the strong inference is that he lied to protect somebody else. Just today, this very day, Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” You read that, and you blink. As the prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted: “I mean, even Tony Soprano would have used only a pay phone or burner phone to say something like this.” Stone said it on the record to one of the best-known reporters in Washington. In so many words, he seemed to imply: I could have hurt the president if I’d rolled over on him. I kept my mouth shut. He owes me. And sure enough, Trump did owe him. Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month sentence. Roger Stone will not go to prison. Stone’s former business partner Paul Manafort is likewise keeping silent. And so the American public will likely never know what use the Russians made of the Trump polling information that Manafort shared with them. Manafort has extra reason to keep quiet, for he must feel new confidence that his pardon is coming. But how much more do we need to know? At every step in this story, the formula I’ve mentioned in previous essays continues to hold: “Many secrets. No mysteries.” Although crucial details remain concealed, the core narrative has been visible from the start. An American private citizen worked with foreign spies to damage one presidential candidate and help the other. That president accepted the help. When caught, the private citizen lied. When the private citizen was punished, the president commuted his sentence. It’s all there: as bold as the spats on Roger Stone’s shoes, as ugly as the 130,000 Americans dead, and daily rising, because of the malign incompetence of the president assisted into the Oval Office by Stone, Manafort, and the Russian spy services.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/11/mueller-stone-oped/?arc404=true Robert Mueller: Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so Robert S. Mueller III served as special counsel for the Justice Department from 2017 to 2019. The work of the special counsel’s office — its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions — should speak for itself. But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so. Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood. By late 2016, the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate. And the FBI knew that the Russians had done just that: Beginning in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian military intelligence officers from the Clinton campaign. Other online personas using false names — fronts for Russian military intelligence — also released Clinton campaign emails. Following FBI Director James B. Comey’s termination in May 2017, the acting attorney general named me as special counsel and directed the special counsel’s office to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The order specified lines of investigation for us to pursue, including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. One of our cases involved Stone, an official on the campaign until mid-2015 and a supporter of the campaign throughout 2016. Stone became a central figure in our investigation for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers. We now have a detailed picture of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate. We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel — Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its activities. The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. It also established that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts. Uncovering and tracing Russian outreach and interference activities was a complex task. The investigation to understand these activities took two years and substantial effort. Based on our work, eight individuals pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial, and more than two dozen Russian individuals and entities, including senior Russian intelligence officers, were charged with federal crimes. Congress also investigated and sought information from Stone. A jury later determined he lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress. The jury ultimately convicted Stone of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands. Russian efforts to interfere in our political system, and the essential question of whether those efforts involved the Trump campaign, required investigation. In that investigation, it was critical for us (and, before us, the FBI) to obtain full and accurate information. Likewise, it was critical for Congress to obtain accurate information from its witnesses. When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts. We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/us/politics/mueller-roger-stone-oped.html In Rare Public Comments, Mueller Defends Prosecution of Roger Stone Breaking his silence, the former special counsel rebutted President Trump’s attacks on the Russia investigation and said Mr. Stone had been prosecuted “because he committed federal crimes.” WASHINGTON — The former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III broke his long silence on Saturday to defend his prosecution of Roger J. Stone Jr., forcefully rebutting President Trump’s claims that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was political and illegitimate. Speaking out the day after Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Stone’s prison sentence for obstructing an inquiry into Russia’s role in the campaign, Mr. Mueller said Mr. Stone was no innocent victim and emphasized that the president’s clemency grant did not erase the conviction on seven felony counts. “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes,” Mr. Mueller wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.” Mr. Mueller seemed most aggrieved over the president’s assertions of bad faith on the part of those who prosecuted Mr. Stone and others affiliated with Mr. Trump. “We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.” The special counsel’s article was remarkable in that it was the first time he had offered an extended defense of his two-year investigation after an endless barrage of attacks by Mr. Trump, who refers to it as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Even when he appeared before Congress to testify about his conclusions last July, Mr. Mueller was largely restrained and avoided any appearance of confrontation with the president. Mr. Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia had mounted an extensive effort to interfere in the 2016 election with the purpose of helping Mr. Trump. While it did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, it did outline numerous contacts between them and said the campaign had known it was benefiting from Moscow’s help. It also identified 10 instances when Mr. Trump took actions to impede the investigation but did not charge him with obstruction of justice, given a Justice Department edict against indicting a sitting president. In the year since the Mueller report was released, Mr. Trump has alternately characterized it both as a “total exoneration” and a “total ‘hit job,’” while his attorney general, William P. Barr, has embarked on a multifaceted effort to question the legitimacy of the special counsel’s inquiry and various prosecutions that resulted. In its statement announcing clemency for Mr. Stone, the White House called him “a victim of the Russia Hoax.” “As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface,” the statement said. It added: “This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.” In his op-ed, Mr. Mueller rejected that characterization, noting that his investigation had documented a serious threat to American democracy both through illegal hacking of Democratic Party emails and through an online campaign of fake messages meant to damage Hillary Clinton. “We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel — Stone among them,” Mr. Mueller wrote. “We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its activities. The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. It also established that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” He added that Mr. Stone had lied about his communications with WikiLeaks, which published the hacked emails, and about his communications with the Trump campaign about the group’s plans. “When a subject lies to investigators,” Mr. Mueller said, “it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.”
Sounds like Putin's been sharing notes in those late night calls https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/trump-putting-show-portland/614521/ Trump Is Putting On a Show in Portland The president is deploying the kind of performative authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin pioneered. The very idea seems, on the face of it, sheer madness. In Portland, Oregon, federal security officers dressed for combat—wearing jungle-camouflage uniforms with unclear markings, carrying heavy weapons, using batons and tear gas—are patrolling the streets, making random arrests, throwing people into unmarked vans. The officers do not come from institutions that specialize in political crowd control. Instead, they come from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard. These are people with experience patrolling the border, frisking airline passengers, and deporting undocumented immigrants—exactly the wrong sort of experience needed to carry out the delicate task of policing an angry political protest. Unsurprisingly, these troops are making rudimentary mistakes. Instead of working with local leaders, they have antagonized them. Instead of coaxing people to go home, their behavior has caused more people to come out onto the streets. Instead of calming the situation, they are infuriating people. They have escalated the violence. They have made the situation worse. Why has this been allowed to happen? Any rank amateur could have predicted that unprepared troops with guns would increase tension and prolong the crisis. The people in the White House and the Department of Homeland Security who have sent employees of ICE and the Coast Guard into Portland surely knew that they would make people angrier. But although the administration’s behavior makes no sense as law enforcement, it makes perfect sense as a new kind of campaign tactic. Welcome to the world of performative authoritarianism, a form of politics that reached new heights of sophistication in Russia over the past decade and has now arrived in the United States. Unlike 20th-century authoritarianism, this 21st-century, postmodern influence campaign does not require the creation of a total police state. Nor does it require complete control of information, or mass arrests. It can be carried out, instead, with a few media outlets and a few carefully targeted arrests. That these tactics are not “totalitarian” doesn’t make them legal, acceptable, or normal. I repeat: Citizens’ rights are being violated in Portland. People have been hauled off the streets into unmarked vehicles. Long-standing precedents about the relationship between states and the federal government have been overturned. Lawsuits have already been filed. But even if the courts eventually force the troops in jungle camouflage off the streets, the president who sent them there—and who is now threatening to send similar troops to other cities—might not care. That’s because the purpose of these troops is not to bring peace to Portland. The purpose is to transmit a message. Americans should find this tactic familiar, because we’ve seen it before. When the Trump administration cruelly separated children from their families at the southern border, that was, among other things, a performance designed to show the public just how much the president dislikes immigrants from Mexico and Honduras. The attack on demonstrators in Portland is like that: a performance designed to show just how much Trump dislikes “liberal” Americans, “urban” Americans, “Democrat” Americans. To put it differently (and to echo my colleague Adam Serwer): The chaos in Portland is not an accident. The chaos is the point. The chaos is also a tactic, and now it will be put to use. Now that it has been deliberately escalated, the violence will provide pictures, footage, video clips, and other material for Trump’s media supporters, and eventually for his campaign advertisements. On Fox News, Sean Hannity has already denounced Portland as a “war zone.” Tucker Carlson has spoken of protesters as “mobs” who keep liberal Democrats in power. The next stage will implicate Joe Biden in this same story: The president’s aides have told journalists that Biden, if he wins, will “allow left-wing fascists to destroy America.” Protesters, mobs, chaos, fascists, the left, the “Dems”, Biden—they’re all one narrative. The Trump administration will show people pictures of its uniformed troops pushing back against them, restoring order with a strong hand. And it will use the kind of language that appeals to that part of the population that prizes safety over all else. Students of modern dictatorship will find these tactics wearily familiar. Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump admires, has deployed performative authoritarianism, alongside other tools, in order to keep himself in power for many years now. In 2014, during a political crisis in Ukraine, he created an elaborate media narrative that equated Ukrainian democracy protesters with 1940s fascists. Russian state television showed scenes of violence over and over again—scenes that Putin himself had helped create, first by encouraging the former Ukrainian president to shoot at demonstrators, and then by invading the country. He sent troops in unmarked uniforms—the infamous “little green men”—into Crimea and eventually eastern Ukraine to “dominate” the situation, to use Trump’s own word for his tactics in Portland. Or at least that was the way it was meant to look on TV. Russian media also went a step further and added some fake elements to the real tragedy, inventing, for example, a preposterous story about Ukrainian forces crucifying a child. Will this be the next stage of the Trump administration’s program too? Just this week, Trump’s official Facebook page published an advertisement purporting to show yet another scene of American urban violence. The slogan reads public safety vs chaos & violence, and the ad contrasts a photograph of a somber, concerned Trump with another showing demonstrators pummeling a police officer. But the latter image was not taken in Portland. Sourced from the internet, it was taken in … Ukraine. In 2014. In the ad, which is attributed to Evangelicals for Trump, the insignia on the officer’s shoulder includes a Ukrainian Orthodox cross. You can see the appeal of this method. If the lawsuits become a problem, if the courts stand in the way, or if local mayors find ways to prevent customs officers from policing more American cities, this could be the Trump campaign’s solution: Don’t bother using photographs or footage of Americans at all. Just borrow the pictures directly from the Kremlin’s own arsenal, along with its playbook.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html The F.B.I. Pledged to Keep a Source Anonymous. Trump Allies Aided His Unmasking. After a Russia expert who had collected research on Donald Trump for a disputed dossier agreed to tell the F.B.I. what he knew about it, law enforcement officials declassified a road map to identifying him. WASHINGTON — Not long after the early 2017 publication of a notorious dossier about President Trump jolted Washington, an expert in Russian politics told the F.B.I. he had been one of its key sources, drawing on his contacts to deliver information that would make up some of the most salacious and unproven assertions in the document. The F.B.I. had approached the expert, a man named Igor Danchenko, as it vetted the dossier’s claims. He agreed to tell investigators what he knew with an important condition, people familiar with the matter said — that the F.B.I. keep his identity secret so he could protect himself, his sources and his family and friends in Russia. But his hope of remaining anonymous evaporated last week after Attorney General William P. Barr directed the F.B.I. to declassify a redacted report about its three-day interview of Mr. Danchenko in 2017 and hand it over to Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Graham promptly made the interview summary public while calling the entire Russia investigation “corrupt.” The report blacked out Mr. Danchenko’s name and other identifying information. But within two days, a post on a newly created blog entitled “I Found the Primary Subsource” identified him, citing clues left visible in the F.B.I. document. A pseudonymous Twitter account created in May then promoted the existence of the blog. And the next day, RT, the Kremlin-owned, English-language news and propaganda outlet, published an article amplifying Mr. Danchenko’s identification. The decision by Justice Department and F.B.I. leaders to divulge such a report was highly unusual and created the risk it would help identify a person who had confidentially provided information to agents, even if officials did not intend to provide such a road map. The move comes at a time when Mr. Barr, who is to testify before lawmakers on Tuesday, has repeatedly been accused of abusing his powers to help Mr. Trump politically. Former law enforcement officials said the outing will make it harder for F.B.I. agents to gain the trust of people they need to cooperate in future and unrelated investigations. “These things have to remain very closely held because you put witnesses at risk,” said James W. McJunkin, a former F.B.I. assistant director for counterterrorism. “To release sensitive information unnecessarily that could jeopardize someone’s life is egregious.” A lawyer for Mr. Danchenko, Mark E. Schamel, said that because his client’s name had already been exposed, he would not ask The New York Times to withhold it. He acknowledged that “Igor Danchenko has been identified as one of the sources who provided data and analysis” to Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled the dossier and whose last name has become shorthand for it. Mr. Danchenko’s identity is noteworthy because it further calls into question the credibility of the dossier. By turning to Mr. Danchenko as his primary source to gather possible dirt on Mr. Trump involving Russia, Mr. Steele was relying not on someone with a history of working with Russian intelligence operatives or bringing to light their covert activities but instead a researcher focused on analyzing business and political risks in Russia. Spokespeople at both the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declined to comment. An email sent to an address listed on the blog was not returned. Mr. Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill have long sought access to Justice Department and F.B.I. documents about the Russia investigation. The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, told lawmakers in late 2017 that the bureau was wary of turning over records related to its effort to verify the Steele dossier to Congress. “We are dealing with very, very dicey questions of sources and methods, which is the lifeblood of foreign intelligence and our liaison relationships with our foreign partners,” he said. But since his confirmation early last year, Mr. Barr and other Trump appointees have approved a wave of extraordinary declassifications that the president’s allies, including Mr. Graham, have used to attack the Russia inquiry. Mr. Graham said he had asked the F.B.I. to declassify the interview report after it was described in an inspector general report last year because he wanted the public to read it. He stressed that he did not know the identity of Mr. Steele’s source and said he did not know whether the F.B.I. released identifying information it should have protected, saying the bureau had appeared to be “painstaking” in redacting such details. “I don’t know how he was exposed,” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Friday. “I didn’t see anything in the memo exposing who he was. I mean, you can believe these websites if you want to — I don’t know. I know this: It’s important for the country to understand what happened here.” In addition to their political implications, the documents have at times revealed the closely held secrets that Mr. Wray feared jeopardizing: sources of information and the methods used for gathering it. Transcripts of recordings released in April resulted in the identification of a confidential F.B.I. informant who had agree to wear a wire when talking to George Papadopoulos, a former Trump adviser who was convicted of lying to the F.B.I. Other released transcripts of a Russian diplomat’s conversations with former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn revealed that the bureau was able to monitor the phone line of the Russian Embassy in Washington even before a call connected with Mr. Flynn’s voice mail. The unmaskings from the release of the F.B.I. report have already spiraled beyond Mr. Danchenko. Building on the knowledge of his identity, another Twitter user named a likely source for Mr. Danchenko. Online sleuths were trying to identify others from his network who were cited but not named in the Steele dossier. The release of Mr. Danchenko’s interview summary likely put him and other sources in Russia’s sights, said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Under Attorney General Barr, the levers of the Department of Justice continue to be weaponized in defense of the president’s political agenda, even at the expense of national security,” said Mr. Warner, who did not confirm that Mr. Danchenko was Mr. Steele’s primary source or discuss his committee’s own investigation into Russian election interference. “I’m deeply concerned by this release. There is no doubt that the Russians are poring over it to see if they can identify this individual or other sources.” Mr. Danchenko also cooperated with the intelligence committee on condition of confidentiality, according to two people familiar with its investigation. Some posts on the blog that revealed Mr. Danchenko’s name are dated before Mr. Graham released the interview report, but the Twitter user who promoted the blog said he or she had backdated the posts to change their order. Born in Ukraine, Mr. Danchenko, 42, is a Russian-trained lawyer who earned degrees at the University of Louisville and Georgetown University, according to LinkedIn. He was a senior research analyst from 2005 to 2010 at the Brookings Institution, where he co-wrote a research paper showing that, as a student, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared to have plagiarized part of his dissertation. According to his interview with the F.B.I., Mr. Steele contacted Mr. Danchenko around March 2016 and assigned him to ask people he knew in Russia and Ukraine about connections, including any ties to corruption, between a pro-Russian government in Ukraine and the veteran Republican strategist Paul Manafort. Mr. Steele did not explain why, but Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign around that time and was later promoted to its chairman. He was convicted in 2018 of tax and bank fraud and other charges that grew out of the Russia investigation. Mr. Steele later expanded Mr. Danchenko’s assignment to look for any compromising information about Mr. Trump. By Jan. 13, 2017, the F.B.I. had identified Mr. Danchenko, who soon agreed to answer investigators’ questions in exchange for immunity. The F.B.I. told a court it found Mr. Danchenko “truthful and cooperative,” according to the report by the Justice Department inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, although a supervisory F.B.I. intelligence analyst said Mr. Danchenko may have minimized aspects of what he told Mr. Steele. Mr. Graham said he wanted the public to be able to see for itself how the interview report “clearly shows that the dossier was not reliable and they continued to use it anyway.” Mr. Danchenko did nothing wrong in accepting a paid assignment to gather allegations about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia and conveying them to Mr. Steele’s research firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, said Mr. Schamel, who attended his client’s F.B.I. debriefings but whose name was redacted from the report about them. “Mr. Danchenko is a highly respected senior research analyst; he is neither an author nor editor for any of the final reports produced by Orbis,” Mr. Schamel said. “Mr. Danchenko stands by his data analysis and research and will leave it to others to evaluate and interpret any broader story with regard to Orbis’s final report.” The Steele dossier was deeply flawed. For example, it included a claim that Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen had met with a Russian intelligence officer in Prague to discuss collusion with the campaign. The report by the special counsel who took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, found that Mr. Cohen never traveled to Prague. And Mr. Danchenko’s statements to the F.B.I. contradicted parts of the dossier, suggesting that Mr. Steele may have exaggerated the soundness of other allegations, making what Mr. Danchenko portrayed as rumor and speculation sound more solid. The Steele dossier played no role in the F.B.I.’s opening of the Russia investigation in July 2016, and Mr. Mueller did not rely on it for his report. But its flaws have taken on outsized political significance, as Mr. Trump’s allies have sought to conflate it with the larger effort to understand Russia’s covert efforts to tilt the 2016 election in his favor and whether any Trump campaign associates conspired in that effort. Mr. Mueller laid out extensive details about Russia’s covert operation and contacts with Trump campaign associates, but found insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy charges. The dossier did play an important role in a narrow part of the F.B.I.’s early Russia investigation: the wiretapping of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser with close ties to Russian officials, which began in October 2016 and was extended three times in 2017. The Justice Department’s applications for court orders authorizing the wiretap relied in part on information from the dossier in making the case that investigators had reason to believe that Mr. Page might be working with Russians. Mr. Page was never charged, and Mr. Mueller’s report only briefly discussed him. Mr. Horowitz scathingly portrayed the wiretap applications as riddled with errors and omissions. Mr. Danchenko provided information to Mr. Steele that figured into one of the biggest flaws with those applications. Mr. Horowitz first brought to public light that when the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele’s primary source — who turned out to be Mr. Danchenko — his account was inconsistent with important aspects of the dossier. But law enforcement officials recycled the same language derived from the dossier in their final two applications for court orders to continue wiretapping Mr. Page. They also told a court they had spoken to Mr. Steele’s primary source but without revealing that his statements raised questions about the dossier’s credibility, which Mr. Horowitz said was misleading. After the inspector general report, the F.B.I. conceded to the court that it should not have sought the last two renewals. The disclosure of Mr. Danchenko’s identity — which the inspector general report concealed — also brought into focus another questionable statement in the wiretap applications. Mr. Horowitz wrote that the last two applications described Mr. Steele’s source as “Russian-based.” Though Mr. Danchenko visited Moscow while gathering information for Mr. Steele, he lives in the United States. A criminal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Barr to scrutinize the Russia investigation, John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, has also focused on the dossier and asked questions about Mr. Danchenko, according to people familiar with aspects of his inquiry. Mr. Schamel said he had not been contacted by Mr. Durham or his investigators.
Cleaner Barr hard at work https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/politics/barr-hearing-preview-opening-statement/index.html Barr calls Russia scandal 'bogus,' says he acts independently of Trump in blistering opening statement "Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus 'Russiagate' scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President's factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions. Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda today," Barr says in his written remarks.