President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press along the South Lawn driveway Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020 (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows disclosed Monday that President Trump has ordered him to release transcripts of interviews with the primary source of the Trump-Russia conspiracy claims in the debunked Steele dossier.
"He's already tasked me with getting some declassification rolling in a follow-up to some of the requests that Devin Nunes and others have made," Meadows told "Fox & Friends," referring to the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
The disclosure was made without further comment in an interview that focused on the treatment of the president for COVID 19 and his expected release from the Walter Reed Medical Center.
The FBI interviews are of former Brookings Institute researcher Igor Danchenko, the "primary source" of the document authored by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.
The Obama FBI and Justice Department used the Steele dossier -- which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign -- as primary evidence to obtain warrants to spy on Trump volunteer adviser Carter Page.
See the "Fox & Friends" interview:
In July, the Washington Times described Danchenko as a "shadowy figure," a Ukraine-born, Russian-educated researcher "who worked in the U.S. and traveled to Moscow to find supposed dirt on candidate Donald Trump."
Washington lawyer Mark E. Schamel confirmed to the New York Times that Danchenko was his client and had been "identified as one of the sources who provided data and analysis" for the Steele dossier.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham R-S.C., has released a 60-page declassified FBI report that detailed three interviews with Danchenko in January 2017.
The subject's name was omitted, and Danchenko was referred to only as Steele’s "primary sub-source."
Danchenko was on the payroll of Steele's investigative London firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
Fiona Hill, who later joined Trump's National Security Council staff and testified at his House impeachment hearing, co-wrote a Brookings paper with Danchenko in 2010. Hill also worked with Steele while he was a British intelligence officer.
She said she believed Steele was played by Russian disinformation in the production of his dossier.
Among the claims of the debunked dossier is that Trump funded Russian hacking, his attorney secretly visited Prague to meet with operatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and there was a well-developed conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
A report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found intelligence agencies had warned the FBI that the dossier contained Kremlin disinformation.
The Washington Times noted the New York Times, "a prime peddler of a Trump-Russia election conspiracy narrative that was ultimately debunked, turned the Danchenko revelation into an anti-White House story."
The New York Times headline was "The F.B.I. Pledged to Keep a Source Anonymous. Trump Allies Aided His Unmasking."
But in a March 2017 interview with the FBI, Danchenko said his sub-sources' information was not worth "a grain of salt."
The FBI, nevertheless, continued to use the dossier to advance it's Trump-Russia probe.
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