Special Counsel John Durham‘s bombshell court filing this week is going to make it hard to paint the FBI as a dupe tricked into investigating former President Donald J. Trump for all that election collusion with Russia we now know never happened. Durham says shadowy Russian operative Igor Danchenko — the key source for the anti-Trump Steele dossier — was on the FBI payroll from 2017-2020. The bureau should have known by 2017, and certainly knew by 2020, that the dossier, which it used to get a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page, was full of ludicrous lies. And the bureau also knew, or should have known, because it had investigated Danchenko just a few years earlier for trying to buy classified information for Mother Russia. If you catch a suspected spy lying to you, but keep using his information to pursue, oh, say a presidential candidate, it gets hard to blame sheer incompetence or stupidity.
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