First came charges against FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty last year to falsifying information presented to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to win permission to spy on the Trump campaign. Second indicted was Washington lawyer Michael Sussmann, who hid his Clinton campaign affiliation when plying the FBI with Trump-Russia collusion allegations contained in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded by the Clinton campaign.
Third is Mr. Danchenko, a Russian employed in 2016 by the liberal Brookings Institution. The indictment charges him with five counts of lying to the FBI regarding the source of “derogatory information … concerning Trump’s purported ties to Russia (the ‘Company Reports’).” The information became the basis for the so-called Steele dossier.
If three’s the charm, No. 4 along the investigative trail could prove the lodestone, a perfidious power within the Clinton circle. Mr. Danchenko falsely denied having communicated with an individual who was “a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics and was then an executive at a U.S. public relations firm (‘PR Executive-l’),” reads the Danchenko indictment. “In truth and in fact, and as Danchenko well knew, Danchenko sourced one or more specific allegations in the Company Reports anonymously to PR Executive-l.”
News reports identify “PR Executive-l” as Charles H. Dolan Jr., a long-time Democrat and adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaigns. From the communication links already exposed, it is clear that investigators believe Mr. Dolan trafficked lies about Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Danchenko passed the falsehoods to Mr. Steele, who incorporated them in his dossier. Mr. Sussmann echoed the lies with his whispers to the FBI. Then, the anti-Trump material served as the investigative basis for FBI lawyer Clinesmith’s deception of the FISA court, which led to the government spying on the Trump campaign and subsequent efforts to destroy a sitting president.