Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, October 11, 2022
The FBI’s network of “confidential human sources” which were used to fuel the “Russia collusion” and Jan. 6 “disinformation” operations must be dealt with in the next session of Congress, Trump White House intelligence adviser Kash Patel said as the trial of primary Russia-born “dossier” source Igor Danchenko was set to begin on Tuesday.
Patel, who as chief investigative counsel for the House Intelligence Committee and played a key role in Rep. Devin Nunes’s unraveling of the false Russia collusion narrative, said special counsel John Durham’s work has raised serious questions about the FBI’s extensive use of confidential human sources.
“John Durham was like the domino that sort of knocked it back here, when he told the world that Igor Danchenko was a confidential human source,” Patel said (see video below).
The FBI has said it has made widespread reforms to FISA warrants and denies politics had anything to do with the decision to pursue the investigation of the Trump campaign. But Patel said the reforms thus far haven’t gone far enough to address the issue of informants.
“I think this John Durham prosecution is going to come full circle and explode the confidential human source corruption cover up network,” Patel said.
Lawmakers told Just the News that it seemed irrational for the FBI to keep Danchenko as a paid informant when they suspected, dating to 2008, that he was tied to Russian intelligence, detected he was deceptive in 2017 and immediately found contradictions between what dossier author Christopher Steele and Danchenko claimed was their intelligence.
“The fact that they took American tax dollars to pay someone that they knew was a liar, to, I would assume, lie to them some more makes absolutely no sense,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and the panel’s likely chairman if the GOP wins control of Congress, told Just the News.
Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: “There is a political cabal inside the FBI that has to be dealt with. It’s inside the Department of Justice also. And the Danchenko revelation that he was on the FBI payroll for three years … They’re paying him for cooking up information for investigating Donald Trump.”
Nunes said the revelation that Danchenko was a paid FBI informant was kept from the House Intelligence Committee in 2017-18 during its Russia collusion probe, an omission he said was critical: “This is now the strongest evidence we have seen that they obstructed — the FBI, DOJ, et al —obstructed Congress’ investigation.”
In the Danchenko trial, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga turned down Durham’s requests to introduce evidence of Danchenko’s alleged lies except those charged in the indictment, “substantially narrowing the case brought before the jury,” Just the News’s John Solomon noted in an Oct. 11 analysis.
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