Recent Additions to the Timeline

Sequencing the News

Trials (and tribulations) often flesh out our understanding of past events — events that are not really past, in that they cast a long shadow over current events. Unlike in the media, there are real penalties (most of the time) for lying, so witnesses cross-examined under oath may bring out previously hidden facts. Such is the trial of Igor Danchenko conducted by the incredibly patient John Durham. Danchenko makes his first appearance in the Timeline in 2008 as a Brookings staffer who offers two Brookings co-workers that if they 'did get a job in the government and had access to classified information, and wanted to make a little extra money', Danchenko knew some people to whom they could speak. The following year, the FBI grows concerned about Danchenko’s contacts with Russian spies. He turns up again in 2013, charged with public drunkenness in Greenbelt Maryland — prosecuted by none other than Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein later upgraded his career to become the caretaker of the Justice Department after Attorney General Sessions ‘recused himself’ from involvement with the Russia-collusion investigation. Rosenstein famously offered to ‘wear a wire’ to incriminate his boss, President Trump, but was told that would not be necessary. The FBI disdained anything so pedestrian as hard evidence. With the resources at their disposal, they could get much more creative, and did.

They had, as is well-known, the Steele dossier. What do spies do when they have to write reports, but they have nothing to report? Some, like Graham Greene, write literary gems like Our Man in Havana. Christopher Steele is, alas, no Graham Greene. The best Steele’s imagination could churn out was the golden showers allegations, which FBI Director Comey dutifully alerted President-Elect Trump to even before Trump moved in (‘Just letting you know what’s out there, sir.’) As late as October 2021 Steele was still claiming the ‘pee tapes’ really existed. But no one has ever seen them. Nor has anyone ever seen any links between Trump and Putin or between Trump and Russian banks (other than a failed 2005 hotel project), despite massive multiple investigations. Before Danchenko’s trial, it had become well-known that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) had paid for Steele’s fantasies, laundering millions of dollars through a network of cutouts including the Perkins Coei law firm and British media consultancy Fusion GPS. But not only did the DNC not get a novel by the likes of Graham Greene, the fiction it bought was not even original. Attorney General (and bagpipes afficianado) William Barr became the first Cabinet official in the history of the United States to use the word jejune (insipid, insubstantial, barren) in public as a descriptor of anything, describing the Steele dossier as such. The dossier, disappointingly for those who believed in it, had actually come from the alcohol-marinated brain of Igor Danchenko. Danchenko had somehow been promoted from suspicion of Russian-spy connections himself to the august status of FBI-paid ‘Confidential Human Source’ (CHS), enabling his exclusion from being mentioned in Congressional testimony under the ‘sources and methods’ exemption. National security, you know.

FBI analyst Brian Auten testifying at the Danchenko trial in October 2022 confirms that no one in the FBI or anywhere else could support the Steele-Danchenko allegations in September 2016 when the Steele dossier first appeared and was circulated by the FBI. The Steele dossier was the only basis used by the FBI to obtain permission from a secret Court (a FISA Warrant) to spy on Trump Campaign staffers. The FBI did not inform the FISA Court that its application for a Warrant lacked the elements of probable cause required for approval. In a bizarre later twist, the FBI in October 2021 still searches in vain for someone — anyone — to say for the record that any of Steele’s assertions are true. How they search for the truth is the standard operating procedure with America’s secret police — they pay for it. Auten (the FBI’s ‘supervisory counterintelligence analyst’, whatever that is) testifies at Danchenko’s trial that the FBI offered Steele $1,000,000, even as late as October 2021, to create some corroborating evidence. Now recall the October 2021 ‘pee tape’ assertions referenced above. This is Steele doing his best to oblige his, um, handlers at the FBI. But even for a million dollars he still cannot find anyone to confirm his assertions.

So I place all this ‘late-breaking news’

Timeline of U.S. Political Transformation, 5

in the Timeline where it belongs, back on September 19, 2016, where you can see the entire sequence as it happened. By searching ‘Danchenko’ you can see he had learned a lot since his Brookings days: Even though he had not landed a job in the Obama Administration, he did manage to get himself on the payroll of Obama’s post-presidential organization on September 29, 2016. March 2017 saw him gaining the coveted FBI CHS status. With the current trial, however, his Federal career appears to be in limbo.