Five years ago, a group of internet sleuths uncovered what remains the single biggest breakthrough in the Russiagate hoax: the identification of Igor Danchenko. Danchenko was the so-called “primary sub-source” behind the infamous Steele dossier, a Clinton campaign subcontractor whose fabrications formed the backbone of the fraudulent Trump-Russia collusion narrative. The FBI had buried his identity deep inside its classified files, hoping it would never come to light. But when it did, the entire hoax collapsed. From start to finish, it had all been made up.
That breakthrough didn’t happen in isolation. It rested on years of meticulous work by a broader community of independent researchers, writers, and investigators — all outside the corporate media, working without institutional backing or access to classified leaks. People like Mollie Hemingway, Margot Cleveland, and many others uncovered key pieces of the Russiagate puzzle while the legacy media actively worked to spread the hoax.
The specific puzzle of Danchenko’s identity fell to Steve McIntyre and me. Our collaboration began in 2018, born from a chance connection. McIntyre, a former mining executive, was known for dismantling the “hockey stick” hoax in climate science. I was a full-time law professor with no particular interest in journalism or politics — until the sheer absurdity of the Trump-Russia story pulled me in. It was infuriating to watch something so transparently false dominate the national conversation and smother the early years of Trump’s presidency.
McIntyre and I shared a simple goal: identify the person who supposedly had access to Vladimir Putin’s innermost secrets — the source of nearly every allegation in the Steele dossier. If we could find that person, we believed, the entire edifice would collapse. And it did.
We already knew the Steele dossier was central to the hoax. As recently confirmed in criminal referrals against former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey — made by CIA Director John Ratcliffe — the dossier was the driving force behind the entire Trump-Russia narrative. Brennan repeatedly downplayed its role, but as Ratcliffe has now confirmed, it was a key part of the fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment commissioned by outgoing President Barack Obama in a last-ditch effort to kneecap Trump before he took office. Now, with the latest release from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we have further confirmation that the intelligence community knowingly advanced the hoax built around the Steele dossier, despite being fully aware that it was false. The operation worked: Trump’s presidency was consumed from day one by a lie.
What McIntyre and I didn’t know at first was how deliberately the FBI had worked to shield the truth. They had gone so far as to make Danchenko a Confidential Human Source (CHS), thereby insulating him from congressional oversight, agency scrutiny, and public records requests. Once someone is a CHS, the FBI can pretend they don’t exist.
We knew we’d need help. And we found it in an online army of anonymous patriots, none more instrumental than @FOOL_NELSON, @walkafyre, and “hmmm,” the sleuth who put the final pieces together five years ago.
Confirming Steele’s Source
The full story is told in my book Switfboating America, but the short version is this: We scoured every sliver of public information, no matter how obscure. In some cases, we zoomed in on tiny pieces of ink peeking out from redactions in FBI documents, matching font size and shape to deduce what a letter might be, then the word, then the sentence. The final breakthrough came on July 17, 2020, when a heavily redacted FBI interview with Danchenko was released. Within two days, we had confirmed it. Igor Danchenko was Steele’s source.
That revelation made everything worse. We already knew the collusion narrative was a lie, but we still assumed Steele’s source might have been someone with at least the appearance of credibility, say, a former intelligence officer with ties to the Kremlin. Instead, we found a washed-up Beltway nobody who didn’t even live in Russia. Danchenko was based in D.C., scrambling for scraps at places like the Democrat-aligned Brookings Institution, the home of Fiona Hill, his mentor and later an anti-Trump impeachment witness. He didn’t know secrets. He knew what his paymasters wanted to hear.
And just like that, on this day five years ago, Russiagate died. Its central premise — that Trump was compromised by Russia, based on information from deep inside the Kremlin — was exposed as a total fabrication. The “source” was a freelance fantasist with rent to pay.
Special Counsel Durham’s Failures
Our discovery set off a chain reaction. Special Counsel John Durham, previously listless, suddenly sprang to life. The owners of Alfa Bank, falsely smeared as intermediaries between Trump and Putin, moved to pursue Danchenko in court. The media, predictably, attacked us. The New York Times painted the citizen sleuths who uncovered the truth as the real villains.
Durham, however, botched the job. For reasons still unclear, he undercharged Danchenko, focusing on marginal offenses instead of the broader conspiracy. One charge was so flimsy the judge dismissed it before it even reached the jury. He was acquitted of the other charges, all of which were variations of the same poorly conceived issue. Durham never used the most obvious leverage: Danchenko’s dependency on a U.S. visa. Nor did he press him for information about Steele or the Clinton operatives behind the hoax. It was an unforgivable failure.
Meanwhile, the Alfa Bank lawsuit was torpedoed by the Biden administration in March 2022, when it abruptly sanctioned the bank’s Russian owners, forcing the case to be shut down.
But those failures don’t change the central fact: Five years ago today, the Russiagate hoax was buried for good. The supposed Russian insider who fueled a national panic turned out to be a broke think tank wannabe saying whatever it took to get paid.
The entire scandal was a fiction stitched together by Clinton operatives, blessed by Obama himself, and weaponized by government agencies and their media allies. It wasn’t exposed by a Pulitzer-winning journalist or a congressional committee. It was exposed by a handful of internet researchers with day jobs.
And that’s the real story of Russiagate’s end.