A Russian-born analyst living in the United States has been identified as the primary source for Christopher Steele, the author of a now-debunked dossier regarding Donald Trump and members of his campaign.
Igor Danchenko, 42, was identified as the dossier source through a series of events that began with the July 17 release of an FBI memo of interviews conducted with Steele’s primary source in January 2017.
The FBI redacted all information in the memo that might identify Danchenko and six of his sub-sources, but a Twitter user pieced together clues from the memo — such that Danchenko worked as a “facilitator” and had studied in the United States — to identify him as the likely source. The Twitter sleuth created a blog laying out information about Danchenko.
On Saturday, The New York Times confirmed that Danchenko was the source.
“Mr. Danchenko is a highly respected senior research analyst; he is neither an author nor editor for any of the final reports produced by Orbis,” Danchenko’s lawyer, Mark Schamel, told the Times.
“Mr. Danchenko stands by his data analysis and research and will leave it to others to evaluate and interpret any broader story with regard to Orbis’s final report,” said Schamel, referring to Orbis Business Intelligence, the London-based firm owned by Steele.
Danchenko, a former analyst at the Brookings Institution, a liberal foreign policy think tank, undercut some of the dossier’s most explosive allegations about Trump and members of his campaign. His statements to the FBI also suggested that he has far fewer connections to Kremlin insiders than Steele’s allies and the media have suggested.
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