Late Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon broke the explosive story that Igor Danchenko, the Russian analyst who lied to the FBI about his role in creating the discredited Steele dossier, stayed on the FBI
payroll as a confidential informant until just before the 2020 election.
A Google search 24 hours later features three news sources for this story in addition to the Free Beacon: Fox News, National Review, and Sky New Australia, whose headline describes the Danchenko revelation as a “bombshell announcement.” To this point, no mainstream media outlet has chosen to report on the “bombshell.”
The source for the Free Beacon’s information is a motion filed by Special Counsel John Durham in a U.S. district court in Virginia related to the admissibility of evidence in Danchenko’s upcoming trial for lying to the FBI. Buried in the motion is this provocative little gem: “In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI. The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020.” The motion does not specify what Danchenko’s role was as an informant, but in a legitimate media environment — or even the kind you see in the movies — journalists would be scrambling to discover that answer first.