A scathing op-ed written by veteran federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy and published in the New York Post on Wednesday dealt a crushing blow to the FBI for their dishonest acts in how they treated President Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
McCarthy discussed the most recent moves taken by Special Counsel John Durham in what is expected to be Durham’s last trial on the Crossfire Hurricane-Russia Collusion Hoax.
Durham had an eventful week as he unearthed a bizarre $1,000,000 payment paid to a guy to authenticate a shady dossier, which the FBI had sworn years ago to be genuine. McCarthy recounted what he witnessed from his perspective and reported on the agency’s actions about Hunter Biden’s evident offenses as follows:
Igor Danchenko and the FBI are both on trial.
This is the topic of special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Danchenko, which enters its third day in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI about two of his sources for the infamous “Steele dossier” — a collection of fake intelligence reports, primarily authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, that depicted then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as a Russian agent.
Danchenko was the primary source for Steele. Durham essentially accuses him of (a) concealing from the FBI that he was receiving information about the Trump campaign from Clinton ally Charles Dolan and (b) falsely claiming he received explosive information from Sergei Millian, a Belarusian American tangentially associated with Trump, alleging the Republican candidate was in a “conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin.
It remains to be seen if Durham will be able to prove these charges: The accusation against Dolan is not crystal clear (since Danchenko did make a vague reference to conversations with him), and Millian has declined to testify because he is abroad and beyond the reach of US subpoena authority.
Former British spy Christopher Steele was promised $1 million by the FBI if he could confirm the accusations in his notorious dossier.
Unquestionably, the trial is showing the FBI’s stunning misconduct in the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Brian Auten, an FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, was the first witness in the case. Durham questioned Auten on behalf of the prosecution. Auten said that the FBI promised Steele $1 million if he could substantiate his outrageous assertions that Trump was in league with Vladimir Putin’s government and that the Kremlin was poised to blackmail the then-candidate because it allegedly possessed a tape of Trump engaged in sexual antics.
In the end, the FBI was never required to pay the $1 million since neither Steele nor Danchenko could prove the accusations in the dossier. According to court documents, Durham’s investigation determined that the so-called “pee tape” was a total fabrication. In addition, when the FBI eventually interviewed Danchenko, months after it had received Steele’s dossier, Danchenko dismissed it as a screed of rumors and innuendo, most of which was inflated and disguised as professional intelligence analysis.
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
More to the point, though, that the FBI offered to pay such an exorbitant sum in hopes Steele’s anti-Trump claims could be backed up is proof positive that the bureau knew these claims were not verified.
That is key. The rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Justice Department mandate the FBI must verify information before submitting it to the court in applying for surveillance warrants. Even though it could not prove the Steele allegations and had every reason to know they were exaggerated if not out-and-out false, the FBI relied on the Steele claims in sworn applications. CONTINUE READING…