Former President Trump this Monday praised his special counsel John Durham’s efforts, saying it was “amazing” watching the indictment last week of Igor Danchenko, who is thought to be a primary source of intel. contained in the anti-Trump dossier.
WSJ editorial board member Kimberly Strassel said after Danchenko’s indictment that a better description of that document could be the “Clinton dossier,” since it was DNC presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign that supported it and people connected with the campaign allegedly fed fake information used inside it.
“It truly has come out,” Trump said during a Fox News interview. “In all fairness, while it has taken some time, hats off to John Durham.”
“Hats off, because, it is coming out, and it is at a level — Durham has revealed things that are really amazing,” Trump added.
“We all kind of knew what happened, and now we know the facts, and I think they are only getting deeper — and it all leads to Dems, Hillary and her dirty lawyers,” he stated.
Trump said Hillary Clinton’s lawyers were always going after him and the whole effort was a total “disgrace.”
“What they did was very illegal, at a level that you have rarely seen before,” he said. “Now it seems like this is the early building blocks.”
Danchenko — a Russian national who worked at the left-leaning Brookings Institute in Washington — was arrested this Thursday and charged with making false statements to the FBI about information he compiled and handed over to former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who used it inside the dossier.
#Durham: 39-page indictment Igor Danchenko stands out because it makes the linkage between Clinton campaign/lawyer, opposition research known as “Steele Dossier” used by FBI to obtain surveillance warrants for Trump campaign aide @carterwpage + then Special Counsel Mueller probe. pic.twitter.com/XVGvUpfYnL
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) November 4, 2021
Steele was hired by the opposition research law firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by the Washington law firm Perkins Coie, who was paid directly by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.
In Sept., Durham indicted lawyer Michael Sussman for issuing false statements to the FBI. Sussman was a partner at the Perkins Coie firm during the 2016 election.
On top of Sussman and Danchenko, Durham also charged former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for changing the details in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant application to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Clinesmith pleaded guilty in Aug. 2020.
The WSJ editorial board contended that the legal case Durham seems to be creating is that the FBI was “fooled” by the Steele dossier.
“The purpose was to give the FBI opposition research that masqueraded as ‘intelligence,’ and it did work. Mrs. Clinton lost, but the Russian tale sabotaged the incoming President with relentless news coverage and a special counsel investigation. The nation spent years obsessing over this conspiracy that did not exist—rather than the Hillary Clinton conspiracy that did,” it said.
“The Durham indictments make the FBI out as the fooled party, but record show former FBI director James Comey and his team knew as early as summer of 2016 that the Clinton team’s fingerprints were all over this dossier,” the board stated.
“A transcript in the Danchenko indictment hints that FBI officials knew Danchenko was in fact lying in the 2017 interviews. But they did nothing to tell Congress.”
In a Saturday opinion article for The Hill, a law professor from George Washington University, Jonathan Turley, suggested that the investigation could go all the way to Hillary Clinton herself.
“Steele also has testified he believed Clinton knew about his work and the creation of the dossier,” Turley wrote. “Yet during the election and afterward, Clinton never admitted that her campaign financially supported the dossier, even with congressional inquiries about this fact.”
…The question is whether Durham really wants to indict just the tail if he can get the whole dog — a question which now may weigh heavily on a number of Washington figures, just as it did following Durham’s indictment in September of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) November 6, 2021
The professor also said on Twitter, “The question is whether Durham wants to indict only the tail if he can get the entire dog — a question which could weigh heavily on many Washington figures.”
Author: Scott Dowdy
