Tangle - The Trump-Russia story takes another turn.

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

On Thursday last week, a Russian analyst who was a primary source for the opposition research about former President Donald Trump compiled in the "Steele Dossier" was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI. Russian-born Igor Danchenko was charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI about, among other things, the sources of information he fed to Christopher Steele, according to an unsealed indictment in a Virginia federal court.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.You can support our podcast by clicking here--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's episode, we have something pretty spicy for you. This is the latest news out of the John Durham investigation of the Trump-Russia investigation. We have covered this briefly recently in September in a newsletter edition, and now we have some more information and some more stuff to share and another indictment to sort of pour over and talk about. And I think it's a pretty big deal. I think

it's a very big deal. So we're going to jump in and explain that in just a minute. But before we do, as always, we'll start with some quick hits. First up, U.S. inflation numbers reached a 30-year high at 6.2% as supply shortages and consumer demand continued to push up prices. Number two, the House committee issued 10 more subpoenas of former White House officials. Number three, a federal judge denied a request from former President Trump to block the release of White House records related to the January 6th Capitol riots. Number four, the United States is going to announce it has brokered a deal to get more doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccines into conflict zones around the world. Number five, anchorman Brian Williams announced he was leaving MSNBC and NBC News at the end of the year. All right, that's it for today's Quick Hits. That brings us to

our main story, which today is the John Durham probe. On Thursday last week, a Russian analyst who was a primary source for the opposition research about former President Donald Trump compiled in the Steele dossier was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI. Russian-born Igor Danchenko was charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI about, among other things, the sources of information he fed to Christopher Steele. That's according to a new unsealed indictment in a Virginia federal court. To just back up really quick and set the table here, in 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr

launched an investigation to review decisions made by intelligence and law enforcement officers during their investigation into whether President Trump received assistance from Russia during the 2016 election. Barr tapped John Durham as special counsel. Durham has spent more than two years investigating the investigation, and Danchenko is the latest person to be indicted. Durham also charged a cybersecurity attorney for allegedly misrepresenting who he was working for during a meeting with the FBI. He also charged a cybersecurity attorney for allegedly misrepresenting who he was working for during a meeting with the FBI. He also charged a former FBI attorney for altering an email used to justify monitoring Trump's campaign. Now, Durham is charging Danchenko, who allegedly fed information to Steele that was sourced not from Russia-based assets, but from DC gossip and Democratic operatives back in

the States. Danchenko was interviewed several times when the FBI began investigating claims about Trump, and he is now being charged with misleading investigators about how he collected the information that was later included in the Steele dossier. Christopher Steele was originally hired by Fusion GPS, a Washington research firm that was initially hired to do opposition research on Trump by his Republican primary opponents. Once Trump won the Republican nomination, Fusion GPS sought out Democratic funding to continue their work. When they won a contract with the Democratic Party, they hired Steele to investigate Trump's Russia ties. with the Democratic Party, they hired Steele to investigate Trump's Russia ties. Steele got much of the information he compiled from Danchenko, who is now alleged to have in turn been sourcing some of his information from Democratic operatives like Chuck Dolan and advisor to the Clinton who

is back in the States. If true, these charges would cast new doubt on some of the information about Trump and his ties to Russia that circulated in the media before and after he became president. Denchenko has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Previously, we covered the indictment of Michael Sussman and the Durham probe in a past newsletter and podcast, which you can find a link to in today's newsletter. So now we are going to jump into some reactions from the left and the right, and then my take. First up, the left is focused on the damage the indictment does for the media's

credibility, though some also question aspects of Durham's investigation. In the Washington Post, Eric Wemple said the indictment was more bad news for multiple media outlets, including the Washington Post. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow in December 2017 aired a special report on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. That document, claimed Maddow, relied on information coming from Steele's, quote, deep cover sources inside Russia, end quote. A federal indictment unsealed Thursday has something to say about the quality of those sources, Wemple said. The Danchenko indictment doubles as a critique of several media outlets that covered Steele's reports in 2016 after its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017. As discussed in this series, CNN, MSNBC,

Mother Jones, the McClatchy newspaper chain, and various pundits showered credibility upon the dossier without corroboration and found other topics to cover when a forceful debunking arrived in December 2019 via a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The indictment provides further insight into why the FBI had concluded that the dossier was mostly a jumble of claims that were inaccurate, unconfirmed, or already publicly reported. Sourcing for the dossier was threadbare in the most charitable of depictions. In New York Magazine, Barry Meyer called it a crippling blow for the Steele dossier. It's hard to imagine a turn of events with more

dire consequences than the new indictment for Steele, the dossier, and Fusion GPS, the investigative firm run by two ex-Wall Street Journal reporters that hired the ex-spy on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign and promoted his reports to the media, Meyer said. The charges against Danchenko may also force a reckoning that some journalists who embraced the dossier had hoped to avoid, an examination of their reporting about it and their ties to operatives for hire. Steele appears to have staked his reputation on the veracity of the reports he received from Danchenko. According to Crime in Progress, the book written about the dossier by Glenn Simpson and Peter Frisch, the founders of Fusion GPS, the former spy never disclosed Danchenko's name to them, but instead described him as one of the

most talented collectors of intelligence he had ever worked with. In Durham's indictment, however, Danchenko comes across more like the type of paid informant often found in the world of private spying, one who tells their employer what they want to hear. On her blog Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler challenged one of Durham's allegations that Danchenko was lying to associates about the extent of his work for Christopher Steele. If anyone at the FBI came away from these early interviews believing that Steele and Danchenko were exercising adequate operational security for this project, even ignoring Steele's blabbing to the press, they had no business working in counterintelligence, Wheeler said. Then again, Peter Strzok attempted to carry out an extramarital affair on an FBI device that DOJ investigations would later disclose happened to

have a serious vulnerability built into it by a vendor. And in my own very limited experience, the FBI had uncomfortably shoddy operational security, so maybe there's something to that. Durham claimed that Danchenko lied by saying that he never mentioned he worked for Steele or Orbis to his friends or associates. Durham, as is his sloppy habit, doesn't quote either the question or Danchenko's response, Wheeler wrote. As a result, Durham hid the material fact that Danchenko was not asked whether he revealed that he worked for Orbis, but whether he told people that he collected intelligence for them. And he didn't answer no, he answered yes and no. All right, so that's it for the left's take here, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right says the indictment tells a damning story about the media, the Clinton campaign,

and the FBI. In USA Today, James S. Robbins said Durham is laying bare the extent of the conspiracy to derail Trump. Does anyone still believe the story that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 presidential election? If so, special counsel John Durham's indictment of Igor Danchenko should put their minds at rest, Robbins wrote. The indictment exposes former Hillary Clinton aide Charles Dolan, identified only as PR Executive One, as an important Danchenko source. Dolan allegedly fed Danchenko information he claimed he had obtained when he had a drink with a GOP friend, but later admitted he had fabricated the story. The indictment also shows that PR Executive One was an important source for reporting by the Washington Post and the Times of London when the Steele dossier scandal broke in January 2017. The Danchenko indictment is

particularly telling in detail how the fake story was inserted into the political ecosystem, starting with Dolan and perhaps others. Danchenko allegedly fed the falsehoods to Steele, a British former intelligence operative hired by Fusion GPS to conduct the research. Fusion GPS had been retained by Clinton campaign lawyer Mark Elias, whom law professor Jonathan Turley has called a potential apex target of the Durham probe. Clinton supporters in the government slipped the information to sympathetic operatives in the Justice Department who used it to mount a spying campaign on Trump, and the American news media spread the rumors which undermined the Trump presidency. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the indictment is an

important step in unraveling the Russia case. The facts in the indictment add to the evidence that this was from first to last a dirty trick by the Hillary Clinton campaign and that the media were its gullible promoters. Most notably, the Russian hid the extent that he was working with a Democratic public relations executive with ties to Hillary Clinton. Press reports have identified indelible promoters. Most notably, the Russian hid the extent that he was working with a Democratic public relations executive with ties to Hillary Clinton. Press reports have identified the executive as Charles Dolan, a Clinton associate who in 2016 was actively working to make Hillary the president. The indictment suggests Mr. Dolan was behind several of the salacious and derogatory claims about Mr. Trump that Mr. Danchenko fed to Mr. Steele. Mr. Dolan's attorney told the New

York Times that his client could not comment on ongoing cases. This Durham indictment reads like a story with more to come, but some lessons are already clear, the board said. One question is why the country is only now learning these facts. The Durham indictment treat the FBI as the dupe party, but the records show former FBI Director James Comey and his investigators knew from the summer of 2016 that Clinton campaign fingerprints were all over the dossier. A transcript in the Danchenko indictment suggests that FBI officials knew Mr. Danchenko was lying in the 2017 interviews, but they did nothing to blow the whistle, nor to tell the public or Congress everything they had learned about the origins of the Russia collusion tale.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first

cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. In Bloomberg, Eli Lake asked if the FBI was manipulated by the Democratic Party. It's been clear for nearly two years that Steele's dossier was garbage, Lake wrote. This is mainly thanks to the work of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who released a report in 2019 skewering the FBI for its use of the dossier in its warrant applications, concluding that the Bureau could not confirm any of its original reporting. The main takeaway from the Horowitz investigation was that the FBI cut corners and gamed the

surveillance court. Durham's investigation has taken a different approach. His last two indictments suggest that the FBI was not a villain, but a victim, conned by Democratic operatives to pursue bogus investigations into the Trump campaign. Durham's indictment says Danchenko lies, quote, Again, Derm portrays the FBI as the victims of the Clinton campaign's efforts, Lake said. It's a fair point as far as it goes, but FBI agents were able to discern that Steele's information was worthless without the benefit of knowing Danchenko's relationship to Dolan. They reached this conclusion over the course of four interviews with Danchenko in 2017. Nonetheless, much of the media

treated Steele's allegations as a credible part of an epic FBI investigation until special counsel Robert Mueller announced that he had no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election. All right, that's it for the right and the left's take, which brings me to my take. Well, welcome to Washington, D.C., I guess. First, let's talk about what this is not. This is not proof that the Trump campaign was totally innocent of any wrongdoing during the 2016 election. The Steele dossier was barely mentioned in Robert Mueller's report with good reason, and that report still raised alarming questions about contacts between Trump's advisers and a foreign adversary during the campaign. I'm not saying Trump colluded with Russia.

I'm just saying that there was some smoke there that, you know, might have been worthy of an investigation. This story is very complex, and it features two campaigns that were clearly going to the ends of the earth to destroy each other. But taking the Leitis indictment as a wholesale exoneration of the former president would be foolish and premature, especially given some of the revelations from Mueller's report that did not rely on the Steele dossier. Now, let's talk about what this is. In late September, I wrote about Durham's indictment of Michael Sussman, the high-profile cybersecurity lawyer who came to former FBI counsel James Baker with evidence that a server belonging to Russia-based Alphabank appeared to be communicating with the Trump organization computers. Sussman was charged with lying to Baker about who he was working for. He was representing the Clinton campaign at the time,

and his tip about the Alpha Bank servers was proven to be bunk. I wrote at the time that this was classic DC dirty politics and made me think Durham's investigation was ending with a whimper, not a bang. Does Durham have more, I wrote? Could this be the tip of the iceberg? It's possible, and if he does, I'll change my tune. That's what I said at the end of September. Well, I'm changing my tune. Igor Danchenko is planning to plead not guilty, but the indictment is damning and lines up with other evidence we already have. It also does a few other things. First, it affirms that Christopher Steele was

spreading little more than DC gossip. It was a circular festival of nonsense sold to the FBI and the public as deeply sourced intelligence from highly placed assets. It wasn't. It was garbage, and Steele, who seems to have taken his source at face value, should be embarrassed, but not nearly as embarrassed as the mainstream news outlets who regurgitated it to the public with just as little investigation or probing. In a straight news report on the indictment this week, the Washington Post said Durham's findings, quote, cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including the Washington Post. No kidding. Kudos to the Post for including this and not burying it. It was the sixth paragraph of their story, and for also publishing Eric Wemple's criticisms of the

media on this topic. But it's November 10th, 2021. It's been nearly five years. It shouldn't have taken this long for a media reckoning, and there barely is one as it is. In my effort to compile today's newsletter, Wemple and Meyer were the only non-right-wing mainstream columnists I could find who wrote extensively about the indictment and what it means. Many, many more mea culpas are due. Second, the indictment draws straight lines from the Clinton campaign to the dossier. We've already known the Democratic Party was funding the research, but that Charles Dolan was purportedly one of Danchenko's primary sources and was lying to him, which was then passed on to Steele, who then included it in his reports, is ridiculous. It's beyond ridiculous. It's remarkable for how absolutely cynical it is. A longtime Clinton campaign operative was feeding a source for an ex-British spy who was then being

paid to provide that information back to the Democratic Party, which then used that information to egg on an FBI investigation into Trump and his campaign. In the most charitable telling of this story, one that requires suspending your disbelief, the Clintons and Democrats just wasted a ton of money paying for quote-unquote deeply embedded opposition research they could have gotten by just gossiping with Dolan over coffee in the DNC headquarters. They were all just sitting there together. In a far less charitable telling, one that is almost certainly closer to reality, the Clinton campaign helped bring the Steele dossier to life by supplying the gossip that filled its pages and then holding it up as proof that Trump was a Russian stooge.

The FBI should be embarrassed too, but at least for now, they can claim they were simply incompetent rather than malicious actors. I wouldn't blame you for not buying that story, and I'm certainly not sure I do either. We'll see if that excuse holds up by the time Durham is done, but at this point, I wouldn't bet on it. All right, that's it for my take on today's main story, which brings us to our reader question for the day. This one is from Ren in Boston, Massachusetts. Ren said, it seems to me nothing gets done except massive catch-all efforts like the twin infrastructure bills currently struggling their way through the system. Why can't small, common-sense kitchen table issues like updating or eliminating daylight savings get passed on an a la carte the basis? Ren, that's a good question. There are so many forces at work to produce these kinds of

outcomes, it's hard to know where to begin. For one, I'll say polarization. I mean, anytime a bill comes up for a vote, it's an opportunity to amend it with other stuff just to pass some of what you want. So members of Congress serve a different constituency than each other, and they all have different needs, so their priorities are used as negotiating tools. You want daylight savings changed? Yeah, sure, I'll vote for that, but you have to include funding for this laboratory in my district. That is kind of how it goes. There's also just the simple process of how a bill is made and how many opportunities there are to change it along the way. The house.gov website actually has a

very good and simple explanation of the process that illuminates this. I'm just going to read it off their website because it's probably simpler and better than anything I could write. Laws begin as ideas, the website says. First, a representative sponsors a bill. Then the bill is assigned to a committee for study. If released by the committee, the bill is put on a calendar to be voted on, debated, or amended. If the bill passes by simple majority, the bill moves to the Senate. In the Senate, the bill is assigned to another committee, and if released, debated and voted on. Again, a simple majority passes the bill. least debated and voted on. Again, a simple majority passes the bill. Finally, a conference committee made of House and Senate members works out any differences between the House and Senate

versions of the bill. The resulting bill returns to the House and Senate for final approval. The government printing office prints the revised bill in a process called enrolling, and then the president has 10 days to sign or veto the enrolled bill. So that's the process. At every step of that process, there's committees, there's another person with their own interest to insert themselves into the bill, there's the president. Generally, all these things just help it grow. It just snowballs and snowballs. Finally, there's the money and the political pressure. I mean, donors and voters both want progress, so legislators are

being pushed from all sides to do something for these interests. This often means joining legislative pushes that have a high chance of succeeding in order to add in their own priorities. Remember, the vast majority of proposed legislation never becomes law. So there's a lot more to it, but these are kind of the basic forces that make small bills very big and sort of prevent small singular bills from becoming law. Remember, if you want to ask a question, get it answered in the podcast, you can do that. Just email me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com or reply to one of the newsletters if it's hitting your inbox. All right, so that's it for our reader question. That brings us to the story that matters for today. Facebook says it is planning new restrictions on ad targeting that will have a huge impact

on political advertising and the social media network more broadly. Meta, Facebook's parent company, the new name for Facebook's parent company, said it will eliminate the ability to target based on users' interactions with content related to health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and sexual orientation. That's according to a new Politico report. The change is going to affect January 19, 2022. Facebook acknowledged the change will negatively impact some businesses, but said it was trying to improve the experiences of people in underrepresented groups on its platform. Politico has the story about this. It's linked to in today's newsletter. All right, and that brings us to our numbers

section for today, which I've tied in directly to our main story on Russia and Danchenko and Christopher Steele. 77% is the percentage of Americans who have an unfavorable view of Russia. 22% is the percentage of Americans who have a favorable view of Russia. 66% is the percentage of Americans who had a favorable view of Russia in 2002. 27% is the percentage of Americans who had an unfavorable view of Russia in 2002. 27% is the percentage of Americans who had an unfavorable view of Russia in 2002. $100,000 is the cost of Igor Danchenko's bond. And $168,000 is the amount Christopher Steele was paid for his now infamous dossier,

according to a 2017 statement by Fusion GPS. All right, that brings us to our Have a Nice Day story. This one is about Dwayne the Rock Johnson, who when he was a homeless teenager, which he was for a good deal of his childhood, actually, he was taken in by Bruno Lauer. The man looked after Johnson when his parents couldn't and twice helped him land on his feet as he pursued an acting and wrestling career.

Yesterday, Johnson, who is now 48 years old and one of the wealthiest actors on the planet, posted himself buying Bruno a brand new Ford F-150 truck as a thank you. He also promised to take care of Bruno whenever he decided he wanted to retire from being a wrestling manager. I got you covered, Johnson wrote on Instagram. The story and Johnson's post, which includes a heartfelt thank you, went viral, and it's worth checking out if you need a little pick-me-up today. All right, that is it for today's edition. As always, if you want to support this podcast, please go to readtangle.com, subscribe to our newsletter, subscribe just to support our podcast and this whole project.

There's also a link in your episode description where you can support us. Just click it. Click the link and see what happens. Who knows? You know what I'm saying? I'll see you guys tomorrow, and I hope you have a great night. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman,

and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.