Keystone Cops seems increasingly improbable

I have long taken the position that the appearance of coordination among the FBI, the DNC, the Justice Department, and other Deep Staters in promulgating the Russia Collusion allegation was not a conspiracy but a product of shared and probably even unspoken common interests. Still illegal and a massive betrayal of the public trust but not a conspiracy as often alleged in the more right-leaning sites of the internet.

That it was not, per se, an attempted coup. That it almost certainly did not have top-down sanction.

Once the Robert Mueller report came out with a complete evisceration of the Collusion allegations and with the increasing flow of documentation of a broader involvement of many more people in the effort to push the fake news of Trump Collusion with Russia in the past few months, my position seems increasingly in question. I am not ready to let go of it but it seems increasingly improbable that it is true.

From Meet the Steele Dossier's 'Primary Subsource': Fabulist Russian at Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored by Paul Sperry. There is more reportorial besmirching by implication in this report than I would prefer, but it provides a lot more information and context.

The number of networks of common interest in undermining a non-Establishment winner seems to keep growing and the number of connections between multiple involved parties likewise.

The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele, according to congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Agents continued to use the dossier as grounds to investigate President Trump and put his advisers under counter-espionage surveillance.

The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records.

In an odd twist, a 2013 federal case against Danchenko was prosecuted by then-U.S Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who ended up signing one of the FBI’s dossier-based wiretap warrants as deputy attorney general in 2017.

Danchenko first ran into trouble with the law as he began working for Brookings — the preeminent Democratic think tank in Washington — where he struck up a friendship with Fiona Hill, the White House adviser who testified against Trump during last year's impeachment hearings. Danchenko has described Hill as a mentor, while Hill has sung his praises as a “creative” researcher.

Hill is also close to his boss Steele, who she’d known since 2006. She met with the former British intelligence officer during the 2016 campaign and later received a raw, unpublished copy of the now-debunked dossier.

It does not appear the FBI asked Danchenko about his criminal past or state of sobriety when agents interviewed him in January 2017 in a failed attempt to verify the accuracy of the dossier, which the bureau did only after agents used it to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The opposition research was farmed out by Steele, working for Clinton's campaign, to Danchenko, who was paid for the information he provided.

A newly declassified FBI summary of the FBI-Danchenko meeting reveals agents learned that key allegations in the dossier, which claimed Trump engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin against Clinton, were largely inspired by gossip and bar talk among Danchenko and his drinking buddies, most of whom were childhood friends from Russia.

The FBI memo is heavily redacted and blacks out the name of Steele’s Primary Subsource. But public records and congressional sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirm the identity of the source as Danchenko.

So the DNC contracted with a foreign agent (Steele) to compile a dossier of unqualified gossip from among a group of Russians, some of them working for the DNC-friendly Brookings Institution, to provide a gossamer basis for an FBI investigation led by agents with strong interlocking relationships (friendships and liaisons) to the outgoing administration. Still might be a Keystone Cops scenario but looking increasingly less likely.