Igor Danchenko has been found not guilty.
Igor Danchenko, the main information source for the infamous Steele dossier, was found not guilty of making false statements to the FBI by a federal jury on Tuesday.
According to The Washington Post, Danchenko was cleared of making false statements to the agency regarding the sources of material he provided to Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Solutions, a former British spy.
The Steele dossier, which was eventually exposed as false, was also a key component of the FBI’s requests for FISA warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign employee.
According to the dossier, Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia, which allegedly used video of Trump engaging in prostitution at a Moscow hotel as a form of blackmail.
According to CNN, District Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed one of the five federal counts against Danchenko on Friday after finding that the former Democratic operative’s assertion to the FBI that he discussed specific dossier items with Charles Dolan was “literally true”
The day before, Dolan admitted in court that he misled Danchenko about a meeting with a “GOP friend” while sending him cable news programming.
Danchenko was found not guilty on each of the four charges he was charged with by the jury on Tuesday, according to The New York Times, after the panel deliberated for more than a day.
Dolan, a longtime adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton who worked on the latter’s 2016 presidential campaign, provided the information for at least one allegation in the Steele dossier.
According to CBS News, Steele and his business received payment from the American corporation Fusion GPS, which Democratic lawyers hired to investigate Trump.
The Associated Press reported that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign agreed to pay $130,000 to settle an investigation by the Federal Election Commission into whether they broke campaign finance regulations by failing to disclose money used to fund the Steele dossier’s research.
An earlier court document revealed that Danchenko worked as a paid source for the FBI from March 2017 to 2020. In exchange for a $1 million FBI offer, Steele was supposed to prove the allegations in the dossier during a meeting in October 2016, according to testimony given by FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten last week during Danchenko’s trial, according to CNN.