Russia expert who contributed to the Steele dossier charged with 5 counts of making false statements as part of John Durham's probe

• A Russia expert who was one of the main sources for the Steele dossier was arrested Thursday.
• Igor Danchenko was charged with five felony counts of making false statements to the FBI.

A Russia expert who contributed to the so-called Steele dossier was arrested on Thursday as part of the special counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, The New York Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who currently resides in the US, was charged with five felony counts of making false statements to the FBI, according to a newly unsealed indictment.

The indictment accuses Danchenko of lying to federal agents in multiple interviews conducted from January to November 2017, while the FBI was working to corroborate allegations in the Steele dossier, which is an explosive collection of memos alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was compiled by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele.

Danchenko was the source of perhaps the dossier's most infamous claim: that Trump in 2013 rented out the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, where he hired Russian prostitutes to perform sexual acts in front of him which involved urination. Steele's dossier claimed that Russian intelligence services had video evidence of the encounter and kept it as kompromat on Trump.

Danchenko elaborated on how he came to learn that information in an October 2020 interview with The Times, saying two sources told him of rumors about a possible Trump sex tape and that two Ritz-Carlton employees later provided him with more nebulous information that he believed corroborated the rumors.

However, Danchenko himself acknowledged that the claim was thin at best and that even he was skeptical of whether it was true. But he added that his job was just to collect "raw intelligence" and he wasn't responsible for how Steele, who was his employer at the time, portrayed it.

"Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt," Danchenko told The Times. "Who knows, what if it's not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?"

Many of the dossier's claims are unverified and have not been proven. The public release of the Steele dossier in January 2017 ignited a firestorm that loomed over most of Trump's presidency. It later surfaced that the document was Democratically-funded for opposition research during the 2016 campaign.

Trump dismissed the memos as a "pile of garbage," and he and his Republican allies accused the FBI of fabricating the information to oust Trump from office.

The FBI cited some of its claims when seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The Justice Department inspector general later faulted the FBI for the way it went about seeking the warrants, saying there were "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the application, and that agents "failed to meet the basic obligation" to make sure the applications were "scrupulously accurate."

Steele, for his part, defended his part in producing the dossier in a recent interview with ABC News, telling the outlet, "I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it." He also underscored that although the dossier was funded by Democrats, his work was apolitical, and that he believes Trump is still a threat to US national security.

This story is developing. Check back for updates.