by John Solomon, Just The News:
“This has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation run through the Hillary Clinton campaign,” retired FBI intel boss says.
In one of the more dramatic exchanges during Igor Danchenko’s trial on charges he lied to the FBI during the Russia collusion probe, Special Counsel John Durham confronted a lead agent with evidence he had been warned that the Russian businessman he was using as an informant might be an intelligence asset for Moscow.
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Agent Kevin Helson acknowledged that a female member of the FBI’s Human Intelligence Validation Unit, with two decades of intelligence experience, had raised concerns that Danchenko may be a member of the Russian military intelligence service known as the GRU, but Helson dismissed the concern.
“This is a real problem,” Durham declared, as he and Helson tangled over whether the FBI should have relied on Danchenko as a confidential human source.
Helson dismissed the intelligence analyst’s complaint, insisting Danchenko had provided significant help to the FBI in Russian counterintelligence analysis between 2017 and 2020, so much so that the agent had recommended the bureau compensate the Russian analyst with as much as $500,000 in payments.
In the end, Danchenko has never been charged as a Russian spy. Rather, he is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI starting when he acted as the primary source for former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier and then as a paid informant himself for the bureau. One of the charges was dismissed Friday by the trial judge, and the remaining four counts head to a jury Monday after closing arguments.
Nonetheless, Helson’s performance at the trial — at times he was treated by Durham as a hostile witness — is a reminder that there is a growing body of evidence that the FBI received numerous warnings the evidence it relied upon to pursue Donald Trump for what turned out to be nonexistent Russian collusion very likely could have been tainted by a Russian disinformation campaign by Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services.
And that evidence was often kept from the FISA court that allowed the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page for a full year.
In addition to the revelation of validation team warning, Helson was also forced to admit he never alerted the FISA judges that the FBI had a prior investigation into Danchenko as a possible spy for Russia back in 2008-10. Instead, the FBI falsely told the court it had no derogatory information on Danchenko.
In truth, the FBI had allegations that Danchenko tried to offer money to Americans he expected to go into the Obama administration if they would provide him classified information, Durham said. The prosecutor said that probe was improperly shut down when the FBI incorrectly concluded Danchenko had left the United States. In fact, he had not.
