FBI unmasks its Trump-Russia hoax

OPINION:

For nearly a year, dossier creator Christopher Steele entertained eager FBI agents with tales of a super-source who had all sorts of dirt on President Trump.

In debriefs in Rome in October 2016, as Mr. Trump ran for president, and in London in September 2017, when Mr. Trump was president, Mr. Steele told the FBI that a mysterious businessman fed information to the dossier’s primary source, Russian Igor Danchenko.

The dossier’s major allegation that there was a deep election conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin: It came from the businessman. It inspired the FBI to disrupt the Trump White House to uncover the plot.

This month, the FBI shipped seven electronic “binders” containing 700 pages of Crossfire Hurricane documents to the House Judiciary Committee under an order signed by the probe’s biggest victim, Mr. Trump. The tranches include the FBI notes from those Steele chats, and the name, unmasked, of Mr. Steele’s supposed prized informant: Sergei Millian, a Belarus-born businessman.

Thanks to special counsel John Durham, we know today that Mr. Millian was never a dossier source. Mr. Durham’s probe determined that Mr. Danchenko, while touting Mr. Millian to Mr. Steele and later the FBI, had never met him, much less spoken.

“The evidence uncovered by the Office showed that Danchenko never spoke with Sergei Millian and simply fabricated the allegations that he attributed to Millian,” the Durham Report said.

The FBI could have discovered this by demanding proof from Mr. Danchenko, but it never did. It was having too much fun bringing down Mr. Trump.

Mr. Millian’s name became known publicly, but by unmasking his name in official FBI reports, you get a better idea of how farcical Crossfire Hurricane was.

I compared the redacted FBI notes from the 2017 Steele meeting at a London hotel with the same notes unredacted under Mr. Trump’s order. FBI senior intelligence official Brian Auten compiled the notes. He eventually admitted in a court proceeding that the FBI never confirmed any of the dossier’s substantive claims after paying Mr. Danchenko hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The FBI completely censored the name “Millian” from its redacted report released several years ago. With the name no longer censored, you read that Mr. Danchenko claimed he engaged in a number of Millian contacts. Or, another possibility: Mr. Steele embellished.

“The primary sub source and Millian discussed a possible business deal with some sort of warehouse in Moscow,” the FBI summary says. “Steele recalled seeing some documentation about this business project.” This was blacked out in the original public version.

This anecdote could not be true because Mr. Danchenko and Mr. Millian never communicated.

Mr. Auten, who was working for special counsel Robert Mueller at the time, wrote in 2017 that Mr. Steele’s “Source E” provided Mr. Danchenko [identified as the “primary sub-source”] with information about Paul Manafort, WikiLeaks and Russia’s use of diplomatic staff and an emigre pension program as cover for Russian hacking.

The new binder version reveals that the dossier’s “Source E” was Mr. Millian. He could not have provided all this juicy info because, as I’ve stated, he never spoke with Mr. Danchenko.

Likewise, during the Oct. 3, 2016, interview with Mr. Steele in Rome, he repeated Mr. Danchenko’s claims, including that Mr. Millian was at the Trump campaign headquarters and was in business with the candidate. A Trump Organization official told me there was no such connection.

The binders’ pages contain no bombshells, but there are plot twists and new details, ample hunting ground for Crossfire Hurricane aficionados.

Perhaps the FBI’s most enthusiastic dossier champion was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He wrote for-the-record memos contained in the new binders.

They reveal that Mr. McCabe unilaterally opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. (This came even though Mr. Danchenko had told the FBI he based a lot of his flow to Mr. Steele on gossip and he had confirmed none of it. Zero.)

On May 16, Mr. McCabe arrived in the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Russia investigation.

“I began by telling him that today I approved the opening of an investigation of President Donald Trump,” Mr. McCabe wrote. “I explained that the purpose of the investigation was to investigate allegations of possible collusion between the president and the Russian Government. … The DAG questioned what I meant by collusion.”

I don’t believe any Crossfire Hurricane decision better illustrates the FBI’s lust for Trump blood than opening a criminal probe of a sitting president without consulting first with the guy in charge: Mr. Rosenstein.

Then, FBI attorney Lisa Page wrote her own memo. She described Mr. Rosenstein as chaotic. “It was chaotic because he frequently shifted” topics, she wrote.

Appointed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Rosenstein would emerge as a great FBI defender. He tried to rebuff Rep. Devin Nunes’ investigation to expose FBI wrongdoing in using the phony dossier to obtain court-approved wiretaps.

Moscow’s Alfa Bank ranks second on the Russia hoax meter after the dossier. In 2016, a tech executive in Virginia who wanted to join the Hillary Clinton administration orchestrated the allegation that Mr. Trump was talking secretly to the Kremlin via Alfa Bank emails. Michael A. Sussmann, who worked for the Clinton campaign at the law firm Perkins Coie, took the findings to the FBI general counsel.

The Crossfire Hurricane team sent the stuff to the Chicago field office cybersecurity arm. That team concluded there was no communication. The email domain supposedly receiving messages, a Trump Organization advertising spam address at a Pennsylvania server, was never turned on.

Yet, in December 2016, one of the FBI’s most senior intelligence officials, Joe Pientka, vouched for the Sussmann files.

“The New York Times story from October 3, 2016, that downplayed the connection between Alfa Bank and servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect,” he emailed Brian Auten and Russia probe chief Peter Strzok. “There was communication, and it wasn’t spam.”

The Durham report said Mrs. Clinton personally approved going public with the Alfa Bank hoax. Mr. Durham said that in July 2016, the campaign approved “Clinton Plan Intelligence,” which involved accusing candidate Trump of a Russia conspiracy. From then on, Clinton operators carried dossier material, opposition research and the bank story to the FBI’s welcoming hands.

The bottom line: With the blessing of Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the FBI was chasing giant fabrications to try to bring down an American president. It is one of the most important historical moments in American history.

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.