The Steele Dossier and Russiagate: How a Hoax Became a Three-Year Investigation.

Russiagate is the longest-running political-operations case in this catalog. It is unusual because the entire investigative apparatus that produced it — the FISA court, the FBI counterintelligence division, the Special Counsel's office, the bipartisan congressional oversight committees — has by 2026 produced a documentary record that essentially no participant has the institutional incentive to defend in its 2017 form. The chain of custody runs from a Washington law firm through a London ex-spy to the front page of BuzzFeed and into a federal counterintelligence investigation. Each link has been litigated. Each link is now in the public record. What follows is the documented record.

Where it started — Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, and Orbis

The chain of custody begins in April 2016. The law firm Perkins Coie, then serving as general counsel to Hillary for America (the Clinton presidential campaign) and the Democratic National Committee, retained the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS for Russia-related research on Donald Trump. Perkins Coie partner Marc Elias was the principal contact. Fusion GPS — founded in 2010 by former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch — had previously done work for both Republican and Democratic political clients and corporate clients including, in 2014–2016, the Russian-American businessman Denis Katsyv in the Prevezon Holdings asset-recovery case.

In June 2016, Fusion GPS subcontracted the Russia-research element to Christopher Steele, a former British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer who had served on the agency's Russia desk from 1990 through 2009 and had founded, with Christopher Burrows, the private intelligence firm Orbis Business Intelligence in London in 2009. Steele's brief was, in effect, to use his Russia-network contacts to develop intelligence on the Trump campaign's Russia-related connections. Steele began producing memoranda — formally titled "Company Intelligence Reports" with serial numbers (CIR 2016/080, 081, etc.) — within days of his retention. The first memo is dated June 20, 2016. The final memo is dated December 13, 2016. The 17-memo collection is what came to be called the Steele Dossier.

Steele did not collect the underlying material himself. His primary subsource was Igor Danchenko, a Russian-born researcher then living in the Washington, DC area who had been associated with the Brookings Institution from 2005 through 2010. Danchenko, in turn, drew on a network of secondary sources of varying quality, including longtime acquaintances and, by Danchenko's own later FBI testimony, individuals encountered casually at conferences and through social channels. The chain — from Danchenko's secondary sources, to Danchenko, to Steele, to the dossier as written, to the dossier as transmitted to the FBI and to journalists — was the chain whose verification weaknesses would, three years later, become the central issue.

The Papadopoulos predicate

The FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation, opened on July 31, 2016 by Counterintelligence Division Special Agent Peter Strzok, did not in its formal opening predicate cite the Steele Dossier. Its stated predicate was different. In May 2016, Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos — a 28-year-old hired into the campaign in March of that year — had a series of conversations in London with a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, who told Papadopoulos that the Russian government held emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos subsequently mentioned this conversation, in an apparently casual context at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London on May 10, 2016, to Alexander Downer, then the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a former Australian foreign minister.

Following the July 22, 2016 WikiLeaks publication of DNC emails, Downer's office reported the Papadopoulos conversation to the Australian government, which transmitted the information to the FBI. The information arrived at FBI headquarters in late July. On July 31, 2016, Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane on the basis of the Papadopoulos-Downer conversation.

Steele's first dossier memo had been produced on June 20, 2016 — six weeks before Crossfire Hurricane opened. Steele began transmitting the dossier to the FBI in early July 2016. By September 2016, FBI personnel were meeting with Steele directly. The relationship between the Papadopoulos predicate and the Steele material became intertwined within the first three months of the investigation, in ways the 2019 Horowitz Report and the 2023 Durham Report would later document at length.

The Carter Page FISA

On October 21, 2016, eighteen days before the November presidential election, the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a Title I FISA warrant on Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The application was granted. The warrant was renewed three times — in January 2017, April 2017, and June 2017 — for a cumulative surveillance period of approximately one year.

The Page FISA applications relied substantially on the Steele Dossier. The applications represented Steele as a credible source whose past work for the FBI on unrelated matters had been useful, and characterized the dossier's allegations regarding Page's interactions with Russian state oil executive Igor Sechin as evidence that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. The applications did not disclose to the FISA court several material facts: that Steele's underlying material was funded by Hillary for America and the DNC; that Page had been an operational contact of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2008 through 2013; that Steele had been terminated as an FBI confidential human source in November 2016 for media contacts; and that Steele's primary subsource Igor Danchenko had, in interviews with the FBI in January and March 2017, told the FBI that the underlying material was unverified, based on rumor, and in some cases substantially different in tone and content from what the dossier had presented.

The December 9, 2019 Department of Justice Inspector General Report, prepared under DOJ IG Michael Horowitz, identified 17 significant errors and omissions across the four Page FISA applications. The report concluded that the FBI's failure to update the FISA court following the Danchenko interviews was particularly problematic. FBI Director Christopher Wray subsequently announced approximately 40 corrective actions to the FBI's FISA processes.

In January 2021, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement in the form of a falsified email used in the third Page FISA renewal application. The email had been altered to characterize Page as "not a source" for another agency, when in fact Page had been a CIA operational contact. Clinesmith was sentenced to one year of probation and 400 hours of community service.

The January 10, 2017 BuzzFeed publication

The Steele Dossier was published by BuzzFeed News on the evening of January 10, 2017, ten days before Trump's inauguration. The publication followed a CNN report earlier that same day stating that intelligence chiefs had briefed both President Obama and President-elect Trump on a two-page summary of the dossier's most-cited allegations during the January 6 Trump Tower meeting.

BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief Ben Smith made the publication decision unilaterally. His public defense at the time — that BuzzFeed was publishing the dossier so the public could "make up their own minds" given that government officials had already briefed the President-elect on its contents — became one of the most-debated editorial decisions of the period. Smith's accompanying note acknowledged the dossier's allegations were "unverified, and potentially unverifiable." The dossier's most-cited allegation — the so-called "pee tape" alleging Trump had been recorded in a 2013 Moscow Ritz-Carlton stay — has never been substantiated by any subsequent investigation. The Cohen-Prague allegation has been formally rejected by Mueller, who established that Cohen had not visited Prague in the relevant timeframe. The Page-Sechin allegation likewise has not been substantiated.

The publication shaped public expectation across the early Trump administration. It produced the framework within which the FBI's then-ongoing investigation, the Mueller Special Counsel's appointment four months later, and the eventual three-year congressional and journalistic posture were established.

The Mueller Special Counsel

Following Trump's May 9, 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller — former FBI Director (2001–2013) — as Special Counsel on May 17, 2017. The Mueller Special Counsel inherited Crossfire Hurricane and ran for nearly two years.

The redacted Mueller Report was released on April 18, 2019. Its central finding, in Volume I: "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Volume II addressed obstruction of justice, examined ten incidents in detail, and declined to make a traditional prosecutorial decision — a posture Attorney General William Barr characterized in his subsequent four-page summary as not establishing obstruction. Mueller subsequently testified before Congress on July 24, 2019.

The Special Counsel's office produced indictments and prosecutions of several individuals on charges unrelated to the central conspiracy question. Paul Manafort (Trump's 2016 campaign manager) was convicted in August 2018 of bank and tax fraud unrelated to the campaign. Rick Gates, Manafort's deputy, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and false statements. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI; the case was dropped by the Department of Justice in May 2020 after additional discovery in the Flynn proceedings, and Flynn was pardoned in November 2020. George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to false statements in October 2017. Roger Stone was convicted in November 2019 on seven counts including witness tampering and obstruction; he was pardoned in December 2020.

What the theory claims

The Russiagate case, by 2026, is one whose contested elements have shifted substantially across the decade since BuzzFeed's January 2017 publication. The 2017 framing held that the investigation was uncovering a coordinated influence operation between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. The 2019 Mueller Report did not establish that. The 2019 Horowitz Report identified the FBI's procedural failures on the Page FISA. The 2023 Durham Report concluded the underlying investigation should not have been opened on the evidence available. Each successive document has narrowed the case from what its original framing held.

The thesis researchers most commonly advance now is structural rather than narrowly evidentiary. The argument runs as follows. An opposition-research file commissioned by one presidential campaign and routed through a law firm to a foreign-based ex-intelligence officer entered the United States federal counterintelligence apparatus through a combination of FBI relationships with that ex-officer and parallel media coverage. The federal apparatus then used the file as a basis for surveillance of a US person (Carter Page) without disclosing to the supervising court the file's funding source or the FBI's own internal awareness that the file's primary subsource had told the FBI the material was unverified. The investigation that followed continued for nearly three years, did not establish the conspiracy it had been opened to investigate, and produced collateral consequences across the Trump administration's first term that were, in the assessment of the 2023 Durham Report, not justified by the evidence at the investigation's inception.

The argument is not that no Russian effort to influence the 2016 election occurred — Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the IC's January 2017 assessment all concluded the Russian Internet Research Agency social-media operation and the GRU's hack of the DNC and Podesta emails were real events. The argument is that the conflation of those documented Russian operations with the Steele Dossier's specific allegations regarding the Trump campaign was the analytical move researchers now treat as the case's central failure. The dossier's most prominent allegations have not been substantiated. The investigation built on those allegations was opened, in the Durham Report's assessment, without actual evidence of the conspiracy it set out to investigate.

The Durham Report

John Durham was appointed Special Counsel by Attorney General William Barr on October 19, 2020, with the assignment of investigating the origins and conduct of Crossfire Hurricane. His investigation ran for approximately four and a half years. The Durham Report — formally titled "Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns" — was released on May 15, 2023, running approximately 305 pages.

The report's principal findings. First, that "the FBI did not have any actual evidence of collusion in their possession at the time they opened both their initial preliminary and full investigations." Second, that the Steele Dossier "did not constitute a basis to begin or continue an investigation." Third, that the FBI displayed "noticeably different standards" in how it handled the Trump and Clinton investigations — including, specifically, that the FBI declined to brief the Trump campaign on the Russia-related concerns it was developing about its members, while having earlier chosen to brief the Clinton campaign on similar concerns. Fourth, that the bureau's reliance on confidential human sources of varying credibility, in combination with parallel media coordination, produced an investigative trajectory that internal procedures had not adequately checked.

Durham's investigation produced two trial prosecutions — Sussmann and Danchenko, both acquitted — and one guilty plea (Clinesmith). The report's recommendations focused on procedural reforms rather than additional prosecutions. It was, on release, criticized from one direction for not producing additional indictments and from the opposite direction for the criticisms it leveled at FBI personnel. Durham himself testified before the House Judiciary Committee on June 21, 2023.

The variations within the broader thesis

Three sub-camps within the independent research literature have formed around how the case's broader meaning should be assigned.

The institutional-failure variation holds that what occurred between 2016 and 2019 was a series of procedural failures — by the FBI, the FISA court process, individual journalists, and elements of the political-opposition apparatus — that compounded into a three-year investigation whose evidentiary basis did not support its scope. On this view, the case is properly read as a cautionary record on counterintelligence procedure, the Page FISA reforms are the appropriate institutional response, and the 2023 Durham Report constitutes adequate accounting.

The coordinated-operation variation holds that the case is more than the sum of procedural failures — that the chain of custody from Hillary for America through Perkins Coie through Fusion GPS through Orbis through specific FBI personnel through specific media outlets reflects a coordinated campaign-period operation whose participants understood what they were doing. The evidence cited includes the Federal Election Commission's March 2022 finding that Hillary for America and the DNC had failed to accurately disclose the purpose of the Perkins Coie payments; the Twitter Files documenting sustained FBI-Twitter content moderation around the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story; and the 51-signatory October 2020 letter from former intelligence officials characterizing the laptop story as bearing "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

The continuous-pattern variation reads the case in continuity with longer institutional patterns documented in the catalog of Cold War and post-Cold War intelligence-political integration — the Operation Mockingbird media-management apparatus documented by the 1975–76 Church Committee, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages structure of the 1980s, the post-9/11 surveillance expansions, and the pattern visible in the 2020-cycle interventions. The argument is that the Russiagate case is one instance of a longer institutional pattern in which intelligence-adjacent actors and political campaigns operate in less-than-fully-disclosed coordination.

The connections people make

The Russiagate case sits at the intersection of three longer literatures: the literature on intelligence-press coordination, the literature on intelligence-political coordination, and the literature on counterintelligence-procedural failure. The four most commonly drawn adjacencies are these.

The most direct adjacency is to Operation Mockingbird — the longstanding CIA program of media influence and journalist recruitment, documented by the 1975–76 Senate Church Committee. Researchers reading Russiagate alongside Mockingbird argue that the structural pattern of intelligence-press coordination has not ended; it has evolved. The 51-signatory October 2020 letter from former intelligence officials, the documented FBI-Twitter Trust and Safety communications during the relevant period, and the journalistic ecosystem within which the Steele Dossier moved from London to BuzzFeed are read as updated expressions of the same underlying pattern.

A second adjacency is to the Seth Rich case — the unsolved July 10, 2016 murder of the 27-year-old DNC data analyst whose death has been the subject of competing political-narrative claims throughout the same period. The Seth Rich case has been used by some researchers as a counter-narrative to the Russia-attribution of the DNC email leak, with the alternative framing holding that Rich, rather than a Russian GRU hack, was the original source of the material WikiLeaks published. Mueller's report attributes the DNC leak to GRU. Multiple lawsuits and counter-lawsuits regarding Rich coverage have produced their own documentary records. The case is unresolved.

A third adjacency is to the Gary Webb case — the 1996 Dark Alliance series in which San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb alleged CIA awareness of and protection for traffickers connected to the introduction of crack cocaine to South Central Los Angeles. The Webb case is the most-cited example in the press literature of how a journalist breaking a story that complicates the institutional narrative can be discredited through coordinated press response, even when the underlying allegations are substantially confirmed by subsequent CIA Inspector General reports. Researchers reading Russiagate alongside Webb argue the structural inverse: in Webb's case, a real institutional pattern was buried; in Russiagate, an unsubstantiated allegation was elevated.

A fourth adjacency is to the 9/11 case, more methodologically than topically. The Russiagate case illustrates the same set of methodological questions that 9/11-related independent research has raised across two decades: how should the public weigh the official investigation's conclusions against contradictory primary documents that emerge in declassification waves; how should institutional actors' public statements be assessed against the documentary record they later acknowledge; and how should the press's role in shaping initial public framing be assessed against subsequent investigations' findings. Russiagate's compressed 2016–2023 arc, from BuzzFeed's January 2017 publication to Durham's May 2023 conclusions, gives the methodological questions a unusually tight documentary illustration.

Key voices

• Christopher Steele — former MI6 officer; Orbis Business Intelligence; author of the dossier memoranda June–December 2016.
• Glenn Simpson & Peter Fritsch — co-founders of Fusion GPS; co-authors of Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump (Random House, 2019).
• Marc Elias — Perkins Coie partner; general counsel to Hillary for America 2016; principal contact for the Fusion GPS retention.
• Robert Mueller — Special Counsel May 2017 to March 2019; former FBI Director 2001–2013; author of the April 2019 Mueller Report.
• John Durham — Special Counsel October 2020 to May 2023; former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut; author of the May 2023 Durham Report.
• Michael Horowitz — DOJ Inspector General; author of the December 2019 IG Report on the Carter Page FISA.
• James Comey — FBI Director September 2013 to May 2017; fired by Trump May 9, 2017; central figure in the early Crossfire Hurricane period.
• Peter Strzok — FBI Counterintelligence Special Agent; opened Crossfire Hurricane July 31, 2016; subsequent author of Compromised (2020).
• Andrew McCabe — FBI Deputy Director 2016–2018; acting Director May 2017.
• Devin Nunes — House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman 2015–2019; author of the February 2018 Nunes Memo.
• Adam Schiff — HPSCI Ranking Member 2015–2019, Chairman 2019–2023; author of the Schiff counter-memo February 2018.
• Matt Taibbi — journalist; lead reporter on the Twitter Files release December 2022 onward.

For connected historical material, see our coverage of Operation Mockingbird (the longer literature on intelligence-press coordination), the Seth Rich case (the alternative-attribution framing for the DNC email leak), and the Gary Webb case (the methodological precedent for assessing press-institutional coordination).

The official position

The official position of the United States government is composed of multiple documents that have, across the years, drawn different conclusions. The Mueller Report of April 2019 holds that the investigation did not establish a coordinated conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government regarding the 2016 election interference, and declined to make a prosecutorial determination on obstruction of justice. The Horowitz IG Report of December 2019 holds that the Carter Page FISA applications contained 17 significant errors and omissions and that the FBI's compliance with FISA procedures was inadequate. The Durham Report of May 2023 holds that the FBI lacked actual evidence of collusion at the time Crossfire Hurricane was opened and that the Steele Dossier did not constitute a basis to begin or continue an investigation. The Federal Election Commission in March 2022 fined Hillary for America and the DNC for failing to accurately disclose the purpose of the Perkins Coie payments. The Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan five-volume report (2017–2020) holds that Russian interference in the 2016 election occurred on multiple fronts and that the Trump campaign's contacts with Russian-affiliated individuals presented counterintelligence concerns. The Trump administration's 2025 declassifications produced additional Crossfire Hurricane material whose full consequences are still developing in 2026.

Where it is now

As of 2026, the Russiagate case has settled into its long-term documentary form. The Mueller Report is the federal counterintelligence record. The Horowitz IG Report is the procedural record. The Durham Report is the origins record. The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-volume report is the bipartisan congressional record. The Sussmann and Danchenko trial transcripts are the Durham-era prosecutorial record. The 2022 Federal Election Commission settlement is the campaign-finance record. The 2025 Trump administration declassifications are the most recent additions.

The principal figures have moved into post-investigation careers. James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page have published memoirs and conducted media commentary. Christopher Steele has continued operating Orbis Business Intelligence in London. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch published Crime in Progress in 2019. Igor Danchenko returned to private research after his 2022 acquittal. Carter Page has filed multiple civil suits, including against the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, Yahoo News, and individual former FBI personnel, with mixed outcomes. Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone have all produced post-investigation books and media commentary. Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025 and has issued additional declassification orders for Crossfire Hurricane and related materials.

The longer question — whether the institutional architecture that produced the 2016–2019 sequence can produce similar sequences in subsequent election cycles, and whether the procedural reforms that followed the Horowitz IG Report and the Durham Report are adequate to prevent recurrence — has not been answered. It is, increasingly, the shape of the conversation.

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Frequently asked questions

What was the Steele Dossier?

The Steele Dossier was a series of 17 confidential intelligence memoranda written between June and December 2016 by former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele through his London firm Orbis Business Intelligence. The memos alleged a coordinated influence operation between the Russian government and the Donald Trump presidential campaign, including the existence of a 2013 video recording of Trump in a Moscow hotel room (the so-called "pee tape"), a meeting between Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page and Russian state oil executive Igor Sechin, and a meeting between Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Russian officials in Prague. Steele was hired by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, which had been retained by the Perkins Coie law firm on behalf of Hillary for America and the Democratic National Committee. The dossier was published by BuzzFeed News on January 10, 2017.

Who paid for the Steele Dossier?

The dossier was paid for by Hillary for America (the Clinton presidential campaign) and the Democratic National Committee. The funding moved through the law firm Perkins Coie, where partner Marc Elias served as general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Perkins Coie hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016. Fusion GPS, founded by former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn subcontracted Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence to produce the Russia-related research. The chain of payment was first publicly confirmed in October 2017 by the Washington Post. Federal Election Commission records show that the Hillary for America campaign and the DNC were ultimately fined in March 2022 for failing to accurately disclose the purpose of the payments.

What was Crossfire Hurricane?

Crossfire Hurricane was the FBI counterintelligence investigation opened on July 31, 2016 at FBI headquarters by Counterintelligence Division Special Agent Peter Strzok. Its stated predicate was a conversation that had occurred earlier that year in London between Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer regarding alleged Russian-government possession of damaging material on Hillary Clinton. The Australian government provided the information to the FBI in late July 2016. Crossfire Hurricane was the umbrella for several sub-investigations, including Crossfire Razor (focused on Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn). The investigation was transferred to Special Counsel Robert Mueller upon Mueller's appointment on May 17, 2017.

Who was Christopher Steele?

Christopher Steele is a former British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer who served in the Russia desk from 1990 to 2009, including a posting in Moscow in the early 1990s. He left MI6 in 2009 to co-found, with Christopher Burrows, the London-based private intelligence firm Orbis Business Intelligence. Orbis took on a range of corporate and political clients in the years following its founding. In June 2016, Steele was retained through Fusion GPS to produce the Russia-related research that became the Steele Dossier. Steele met repeatedly with FBI personnel during the second half of 2016 to share his findings. He was terminated as an FBI confidential human source in November 2016 after the FBI determined he had spoken to media.

What was the Carter Page FISA?

On October 21, 2016, the FBI obtained a Title I Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surveillance warrant on Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The warrant was renewed three times: in January 2017, April 2017, and June 2017. The applications relied substantially on the Steele Dossier as evidence that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. The December 9, 2019 report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz identified 17 significant errors and omissions across the four Page FISA applications, including the FBI's failure to disclose to the FISA Court that Page had been a CIA operational contact and the failure to disclose that Steele's primary subsource Igor Danchenko had told the FBI in October 2016 that the dossier's allegations were unverified. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in January 2021 to falsifying an email used in the third Page renewal.

What did the Mueller Report find?

Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 17, 2017, and inherited the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The redacted Mueller Report was released to the public on April 18, 2019. Volume I addressed the question of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 election; Volume II addressed potential obstruction of justice. Volume I concluded that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Volume II declined to make a prosecutorial determination on obstruction. The Special Counsel's office obtained guilty pleas or convictions from several individuals on charges unrelated to the central conspiracy question, including Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone.

What was the Durham Report?

John Durham was appointed Special Counsel by Attorney General William Barr on October 19, 2020 to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane. The Durham Report — formally "Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns" — was released on May 15, 2023, running approximately 305 pages. Its principal findings: that the FBI did not have "actual evidence of collusion" when it opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016; that the Steele Dossier "did not constitute a basis to begin or continue an investigation"; and that the FBI displayed "noticeably different standards" between the Trump and Clinton investigations. Durham's investigation produced two trial prosecutions — Michael Sussmann (2022) and Igor Danchenko (2022) — both of which ended in acquittal.

Who was Igor Danchenko?

Igor Danchenko is a Russian-born researcher who served as Christopher Steele's primary subsource for the Steele Dossier. Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI over multiple sessions in January and March 2017, in which he stated that his contributions to the dossier had been based on rumor, hearsay, and conversations whose participants had not authorized the framings the dossier had ultimately attached to them. The FBI's October 2016 internal awareness of Danchenko's account was withheld from the FISA court in subsequent Carter Page renewals. Danchenko was indicted by the Durham Special Counsel in November 2021 on five counts of making false statements to the FBI. He was tried in October 2022 and acquitted on the four counts that reached the jury; the fifth count was dismissed before verdict.

Who was Michael Sussmann?

Michael Sussmann was a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm that had retained Fusion GPS on behalf of Hillary for America. On September 19, 2016, Sussmann met with FBI General Counsel James Baker and provided materials alleging that there was a covert communications channel between a Trump Organization computer server and Russia's Alfa Bank. The Durham Special Counsel charged Sussmann in September 2021 with making a false statement to Baker — specifically, that he had told Baker he was acting on his own behalf rather than on behalf of a client. Sussmann was tried in May 2022 and acquitted by a jury after approximately six hours of deliberation. The Alfa Bank allegations themselves were not substantiated by subsequent investigation.

What is the connection to the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story?

The Russia-investigation framework established between 2016 and 2019 produced operational consequences for the 2020 election cycle. In October 2020, after the New York Post published its initial reporting on materials from a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden, Twitter and Facebook restricted distribution of the article. A letter signed by 51 former senior US intelligence officials, organized in part by former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Marc Polymeropoulos, characterized the laptop story as bearing "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." The Twitter Files, released by journalist Matt Taibbi and others beginning December 2022, documented sustained FBI-Twitter communications around content moderation in the weeks before the 2020 election. The 51-signatory letter has subsequently been characterized by several signatories as overstated; the laptop's contents have been authenticated by multiple outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post.