Unchastened by Russiagate, The New York Times Doubles Down in Its Special Counsel

The ‘Indirectly Funded’ Dossier 

While falsely suggesting that Durham launched a criminal investigation of Trump for “suspicious financial dealings,” the Times downplays the suspicious dealings of the Hillary Clinton campaign in spreading Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, and how the FBI handled them.  

Start with the Steele dossier ‒ the collection of Trump-Russia fabrications authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and heavily relied upon by the FBI – which the Times tepidly describes as “opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign.”  

In fact, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee directly funded the dossier by funneling more than $1 million through their law firm, Perkins Coie, which in turn hired Steele’s client, Fusion GPS. To conceal this arrangement, the Steele money was earmarked as “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting,” and thereby protected by attorney-client privilege. Last year, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $113,000 for hiding the backdoor payments.   

The Steele dossier itself was not traditional political “opposition research” ‒ which implies dirt at least somewhat grounded in fact ‒ but a highly consequential work of fiction. Durham shed considerable light on this when he indicted for lying to the FBI one of Steele’s main purported sources, Igor Danchenko, a Russian expat connected to Democratic Party politics through the Brookings Institution. The Times tells readers that Durham brought a “demonstrably weak” case that ultimately “failed.” While Danchenko was acquitted, his prosecution brought to light embarrassing facts about the FBI’s conduct, which the Times’ dismissive summary ignores. 

According to the Times’ account, Danchenko merely “told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation.” This is false. Danchenko explicitly told the FBI that corroboration for the dossier’s claims was “zero”; that he had “no idea” where claims sourced to him came from; and that the Russia-Trump rumors he passed along to Steele came from “word of mouth and hearsay,” including alcohol-lubricated conversations with friends. 

The Times also ignores court documents showing that the Steele dossier’s most salacious allegation – that Russia possessed a lurid blackmail tape of President Trump – originated with embellishing tidbits passed on by Charles Dolan, a longtime Democratic Party operative with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Another of Danchenko’s purported “sub-sources,” Sergei Millian, was also not Russian. Moreover, the evidence in the trial showed that he and Danchenko never spoke.  

As for the FBI, the Times describes its reliance on the Steele dossier as a matter of having “used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source … in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide,” Carter Page. The Times adds that the FBI’s wiretap requests contained “errors and omissions.” That again downplays what is already well established: The FBI relied on the Steele dossier to spy on Page while concealing from the FISA court that approved the warrant that the Clinton campaign had paid for it. Moreover, the FBI presented Steele as a “credible” source even though, as the Justice Department inspector general later determined, it was “unable to corroborate any of the substantive allegations” made about Page “which the FBI relied on.” Not only did the FBI fail to corroborate the Steele dossier, it also hid from the FISA court information that contradicted its outlandish allegations.  

The Times’ only nod to the FBI’s malfeasance is made in passing, when it notes that Durham secured a conviction of an “FBI lawyer” it does not identify by name, Kevin Clinesmith, who “doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light.” 

Durham has also revealed that the FBI was aware as early as January 2017 that Danchenko was lying to bureau agents. But instead of informing the FISA court and withdrawing their efforts to spy on Page, the FBI brass instead made Danchenko a confidential human source – thereby insulating him from legal and congressional scrutiny. While keeping his identity secret, the FBI falsely told Congress that Danchenko “did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier,” according to declassified talking points prepared for a 2018 Senate briefing. The FBI paid Danchenko more than $200,000 for his services. 

Danchenko wasn’t the only recipient of the FBI’s largesse. At trial, Durham revealed that the FBI, in October 2016, offered Steele a $1 million payment if he could prove the dossier’s allegations. Having no evidence on offer, Steele declined the opportunity. Despite Steele’s refusal to substantiate his material, the FBI still relied on it to file its first surveillance warrant on Page just over two weeks later – and then three more renewals after that. 

Durham’s ‘Dubious Sources’ 

After downplaying the FBI’s fraudulent reliance on the Steele dossier, the Times accuses Durham of relying on “dubious sources” of his own.  

In the Times’ telling, Durham “wanted to use” sketchy Russian intelligence memos “to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump.” The memos were reportedly hacked by Dutch intelligence and passed on to the CIA.  

But The Times’ lone purported example of Durham’s supposed reliance on these “dubious” sources concerns the FBI’s Clinton email server investigation, which is separate from the Trump-Russia probe. One of the supposed Russian memos is said to claim that Attorney General Loretta Lynch pledged to go easy on Clinton in that investigation. The Times presents no evidence that Durham took this alleged Russian document at face value. He may well have been pursuing the matter to confirm what the FBI did not: whether the document’s claims were a fake.  

According to previously declassified U.S. intelligence, another purported Russian memo is said to describe American citizens discussing “Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan” to falsely link Trump to Russian hacking “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” The Times does not provide any evidence that Durham used this memo “to pursue” a theory about a Clinton plot to “frame” Trump. It nonetheless tries to suggest just that, all while asserting that “some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded” the memos “with disinformation.” Beyond citing unspecified “people familiar with the matter,” the Times also presents no evidence for this claim.  

The Times also omits critical public information that challenges its effort to dismiss the memos as “disinformation.” In September 2020, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified material related to the Russian memos’ claims about a Clinton plan to tie Trump to Russia. The U.S. intelligence community, Ratcliffe stressed, “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which” it “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication” by Russia. But Ratcliffe also stated: “To be clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the Intelligence Community.” 

And if U.S. intelligence officials “doubted” the memos’ “credibility,” as the Times asserts, their actions did not reflect it. According to his handwritten notes, then-CIA Director John Brennan apparently took the assertion of a Clinton plot to frame Trump so seriously that he briefed President Obama and other top officials about it in July 2016. In early September 2016, the CIA followed up by submitting an investigative referral to the FBI regarding what it described as “Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” The redacted referral makes reference to gleaning this information from “an exchange,” which could refer to Russia intercepting contacts between Democratic operatives.  

It seems unlikely that the head of the CIA would feel compelled to brief the president, and then submit an investigative referral to the FBI, if his agency saw the memos, as the Times describes them, as “dubious” and lacking in…