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RealClear Investigations (so long and very detailed) looks into the FBI's use of a Russian spy to attack Trump.
How the FBI Lost, Found, and Rewarded the Alleged Russian Spy Pivotal to Surveilling
Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with ‒ Brian Auten ‒ told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow.
But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by searching federal law enforcement databases. Clueless, the FBI closed its espionage case on Danchenko.
Auten would quickly rise to become the FBI’s top Russian analyst. In 2016 and 2017, he failed to properly vet the Steele dossier, a collection of salacious allegations created for Hillary Clinton’s campaign which sought to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, before clearing it as the central piece of evidence used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Working out of headquarters as a supervisor, Auten knew Danchenko helped Christopher Steele compile the dossier while living in the area. But instead of contacting the Baltimore agents, Auten secretly groomed him as an informant, arranging payments of $220,000 to target Donald Trump and his former aide Page.
One result: Danchenko, the suspected Russian spy, falsely accused Page, a former U.S. Navy officer who had previously helped the FBI, of being a Russian spy in the dossier.
Auten also never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the FBI’s longstanding concerns about Danchenko.
Like the Baltimore agents, investigators at FBI headquarters relied on Auten to build their counterintelligence cases on Page and three other Trump advisers. Auten provided the reports and memos they used to establish probable cause in each case. Auten also supported investigators working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Auten’s conduct was first singled out for rebuke by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who in 2019 issued a report detailing how Auten cut corners in the dossier verification process. Horowitz referred Auten to the FBI for discipline, which does not appear to have been administered.
His earlier and deeper connections to Danchenko have only been more recently revealed in the report issued by Special Counsel John Durham. His findings suggest that if Auten had done his job over a decade ago, chances are the now-discredited dossier never would have been created and used by the FBI to eavesdrop on Page and help launch the Russiagate probe. It’s likely that Danchenko, the main source of the dossier’s allegations, would have been deported years earlier and flagged in the system, according to the recently released Durham Report.
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Originally Posted by Chuck
