Kash Patel: Danchenko, Durham, Auten, and the FBI’s $1 Million Bounty Offer to Christopher Steele
On this episode of “Kash’s Corner,” we discuss developments in the Igor Danchenko Trial, including FBI Agent Brian Auten’s bombshell testimony about the FBI’s offer to Christopher Steele.“Now we learned that there was an offer of one million U.S. dollars to Christopher Steele?” says Kash Patel. “Remember when we broke the news that the DNC and Hillary Clinton had paid for the Steele dossier? … This news is as important and as significant as that.”We also reflect on the media’s “circular reporting” of Russiagate, and speculate as to whether John Durham has a shot at winning.“This is intentional, unlawful activity by our government partnering with the media to pump out disinformation,” says Patel. “We almost need a new word for how bad this is.”
We are actually here in Nashville, Tennessee, where this week we celebrated with country music legend John Rich at his house for a Truth Social launch party.
If you want more details on that, check out Truth Social.
But this week, we're coming at you from just outside Nashville.
And Jan, what do we have in store for today?
This week it's going to be all Danchenko.
There's a Danchenko case is in court.
John Durham is prosecuting it personally, which is kind of amazing.
There's this revelation by Agent Auten that there was a million dollars offered to Christopher Steele to offer corroborative evidence, which Christopher Steele could not provide for a million dollars.
But I think we actually need to go back to the beginning.
There's so many people that watch this show that have watched the ins and outs of this over the last five or longer years.
But there's also a lot of people that might just not know kind of the entire picture of what happened.
So let's go back to first principles, okay?
Okay, let's do a quick summary for some of our new fans and hopefully a refresher for some of our constant fans, which we love.
So as you know, I led the Russia Gate investigation with Chairman Nunes way back in 17, 2017 on the House Intel Committee.
And we were charged with finding out what happened in terms of Russian interference in the presidential election.
And what we found was, or what we charted out, was a path forward.
How do we set foot out on an investigation that provides accountability and oversight, which is Congress's role, it's not DOJ, oversight to the American public?
Well, we got to get the documents, and then you got to call witnesses.
It's kind of, it's pretty simple in terms of when you lay it out, but when you go out to do it, it becomes very difficult.
Or it was for us because the DOJ and FBI stonewalled us at every turn.
And we'll talk about how they blocked production of subpoenas with even revelatory information today, which you're going to get into, I think, with the $1 million payment.
So those were hurdles we had to continuously overcome, or at least try to.
But six years later, I'm learning new information just today on matters of which FBI and DOJ should have provided us information four years ago.
And then we called witnesses.
So we called 60 or 70 some witnesses, swarm in under oath, and I interrogated them and asked them, you know, what I refer to as the three C's.
Are you familiar with, or do you have any information that Donald Trumper's campaign coordinated, conspired, or colluded with the Russian government?
And every single witness under oath, 60 or 70 of them, including former attorney generals, said no, definitively.
And so we thought that information was good to put in a report, which we put out.
You know, the Nunes memo came out.
Everybody's familiar with that.
If they're not, you should read it.
Four pages, quick read, get you right up to speed.
And if you really want to dive in, Lee Smith is the best.
The plot against the president, he wrote the story of how Devin and I ran the Russia Gate investigation and many of its findings.
And it was turned into this wonderful documentary by Amanda Milius, The Plot Against the President.
So if you got 90 minutes this weekend, I suggest you watch it.
If you really want to get up to speed, it's got all the actual players, Devin, myself, and so many others, in that movie detailing what you and I have been working on for the last, gosh, I don't know, half decade now.
Before we go deeper, now that we have these transcripts, lay out for me the case that Durham is making.
Yeah.
So quick recap for our audience on Igor Danchenko.
He's been charged by Special Counsel John Durham in his ongoing investigation with five felonies, five counts of lying to federal agents or federal authorities.
And I'll summarize the five basically in total.
What John Durham is saying is that Igor Denchenkov, who was Christopher Steele's number one source for the Steele dossier, lied to the FBI on multiple separate occasions about matters that have such great consequence that they threw the FBI off track.
And John Durham has now caught him.
The unique part is that Igor Denshenko, and we covered this extensively with last week's exploding news of Igor Denchenko himself being a confidential human source of the FBI, is that he, Igor Denchenkov, went to Christopher Steele and he went to the FBI and he went to Charles Dolan and he went to purportedly Sergei Milan and a few other folks and had these meetings and said he had this information.
And the sum and total of it is John Durham is saying, you actually lied about what you said to Charles Dolan to the FBI.
You lied about what you said about Sergei Milian to the FBI.
You lied about your interactions with a few other people to the FBI about when you said things and or what you said to them in such a matter that it was consequential to an important investigation they were running at the time.
So he's saying you lied five separate times.
That's a lot.
So we know Michael Sussman was charged with one count of lying.
Now we have five separate counts for Denchenko.
So that's the summary of the case.
But I think what we are going to look for as this case unfolds is the substance that John Durham puts out there.
We're going to get into this whole million dollar thing.
We're going to also talk about probably on future episodes about Charles Dolan, the Hillary Clinton operative who pumped out steel information that we are now learning for the first time to possibly government agencies and the media.
And so we're going to get into that.
We're going to talk about how, you know, Sergei Milian, who's a purported source of the Steele dossier, whose life was effectively destroyed when he was outed, and thanks to Lee Smith's great work, actually, it's been shown that he had nothing to do with the dossier.
And a reason that his name was in there improperly was, as John Durham is saying, is Denchenko.
He put it in there.
And Steele then ran with it.
But he never talked to him.
Amazingly.
Amazingly, right.
He, Denchenko, and Steele never spoke to Milian, who was one of the main sources of the dossier.
The FBI met with Igor Denchenko for three years while he was a confidential human source for the FBI.
They could have been asking all these questions.
But as I've said from the beginning, the FBI is smart enough to know the questions they don't want answers to because they didn't want their investigation to be shut down.
And that's what they did.
They, Strzok, Paige, Comey, all those people failed on purpose to answer, to set forth specific questions because they knew the answers would kill the Russia Gate investigation because they would have no credibility for their source verification process and they would have no fundamental facts upon which to go to the FISA court.
That was their end goal.
They engineered a crime and worked in reverse.
And then they went out there, as we'll talk about, and offered up bounties to people with information.
It is a shocking abuse of the law and a total breakdown of the FISA application process before the Fisk.
So one of the people that you deposed was Agent Gaida.
Yeah.
And so we were looking through the transcripts of the case today.
And actually, so we noticed that Gaida was actually in this meeting in, I guess it was early October of 2016, where Steele got this million-dollar offer.
But so did Gaida ever talk to you about that million dollars?
So what you're referring to is I deposed Gaida back in 2017 or 18.
I don't remember the date off the top of my head.
I'm pretty sure it was 2017.
And he was, at the time, had been Steele's handler, as we say.
Every FBI agent who has an undercover source is called their handler.
The source is a primary contact in the FBI that they work with and for.
And at that time, we couldn't reveal that information.
We didn't want to.
It was inappropriate to do so.
But now it's been publicized that Agent Gaida and Christopher Steele had a relationship, and Agent Gata was the one who basically first received the quote-unquote RussiaGate information from Steele and sent it to FBI headquarters in FBI, I think, New York or somewhere else.
So he got the ball rolling.
So it was important for us to interrogate him under oath because he was the main guy who was in at the beginning of the investigation for the FBI.
So Gaida testified, his transcript is now public.
When Rick Rennell and I were at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, we were finally able to declassify and publicize the 60-some transcripts from the House Intel days.
I think it was almost two years after we finished that investigation.
That's another battle we fought to get the information out to the American public.
And now everybody can go read Gaida's transcript.
The shocking thing to me is that we sent out subpoenas.
And now America is well versed in Congress's ability to subpoena people and things and documents, as has been publicized greatly by the January 6th Committee's efforts to do so.
And you see what happens, or at least in the media, what happens when someone doesn't abide by one of those subpoenas from Congress, right, or present the documentation requested.
Well, that's not how we were treated when we issued our subpoenas back during the Russiagate investigation, talk about a two-tier system of justice.
We were stonewalled by Chris Rain as FBI.
Rod Rosenstein at DOJ was effectively the Attorney General.
They did not want to provide us with the documentation we asked for.
We sent subpoena after subpoena after subpoena.
I think we sent like 17 off the top of my head, which is, just to time out here, put it in perspective, the House Intelligence Committee, until I arrived in its 30-plus year existence, had sent one subpoena.
We sent it to the FBI, specifically said the FBI is to present this committee with all the documentary source evidence involving Christopher Steele, including payments and relationships and who he worked with and what he was doing.
We were meticulous because I, as a former national security prosecutor, knew you had to particularize what you wanted.
You couldn't just say, give me everything, Christopher Steele.
Because then they would say, well, we don't know what it's too big.
We don't know how to find it.
So what has floored me yet again?
One, we found out last week or two weeks ago that Denchenko was a paid informant of the FBI, right?
Mind blown.
Now we find out that Gaida and company, including this guy, Otten, who we've talked about repeatedly in the past, for what I believe is he has broken the law on multiple occasions and violated his oath of office.
He is now testifying and saying to the world this week in the Denchenko case that he and Gaeta and others flew somewhere, we don't know where, overseas, met with Steele in October of 2016.
And just to remind our audience, that is just before the first FISA warrant application was entered into against President Trump's campaign, or Carter Page at the time was in President Trump's campaign.
And now we learn that there was an offer of $1 million US dollars to Christopher Steele.
Remember when we broke the news that the DNC and Hillary Clinton had paid for the Steele dossier?
To me, this news is as important and as significant as that.
Because now you have not the political party paying for the dossier, you have the United States government and our tax dollars being offered to Christopher Steele for what?
We now find out it wasn't just go out and get information.
It was, can you, and this is Otten's testimony that I'm paraphrasing from this week in the trial, can you, Christopher Steele, corroborate any of the information that we're looking for as it relates to RussiaGate?
And if you can, we'll pay you a million dollars.
Shocking.
I mean, literally, like, that is the absolute reverse on how you run sources at the FBI.
They bring you information, you vet the information, you vet their sources, you check their credibility, and then you say, okay, we're going to engage you and we can pay you X. You don't go out the door and just put out a bounty for information.
It breaks every rule of running sources, of running credible investigations, and it shows you how political Otten and these guys were.
But what ticks me off about Gaita was he came in under oath and said he told us everything, and not once did he mention anything about this $1 million possible payment to Christopher Steele.
I'll have to give credit to Aaron Mati.
There isn't a lot that blows my mind, right?
Because he was one of these guys that looked at the transcript and noticed that this happens right before that first FISA, October 21st of 2016, is basically set in motion.
But the point was that he wasn't able to provide any evidence.
And then the FISA goes ahead.
Yeah, this is shocking.
You're right.
Let's bring everybody up to speed.
So everybody now knows that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC contracted with Christopher Steele, a former MI6 asset in London, to come up with dirt against Trump and his universe of people, his campaign, so that they could use it politically.
But on top of that, they took that information, gave it to the FBI, knowing it was false.
The FBI received this information knowing it to be false, having had a previous relationship with Christopher Steele as a source of the FBI for years and years prior to this on an unrelated matter.
He now comes back into their orbit and he is charged with producing this information.
He says, oh, I produced all the dossier for short, and he gives it to the FBI, gives it to GADA.
And to bring everyone up to date, full circle, what you're talking about is in October of 2016, when we were going, when the FBI went to the FISA court to apply for the FISA, this was going on then.
And as a guy who has done FISA applications, who has prosecuted terrorists with this very sensitive tool, and I will argue that it's necessary still, but it needs massive reform.
How can you present to the court information you know to be false and information now we know by the FBI's own admission has not been verified or corroborated?
That is the specific reason why the director of the FBI and the attorney general must sign off on every single FISA warrant application.
And we had said so from the beginning of our Russia Gate investigation that James Comey and Andy McCabe and Rod Rosenstein and I think it was whoever Rod Rosenstein's predecessor was signed off on this FISA warrant unlawfully because we knew they didn't verify it.
And we had said that back when and we said that the mainstream media came and attacked us, said, What are you guys talking about?
This is the FBI, they do everything by the book.
No, clearly they were writing their own different book on how to do things, on how to pay informants just to provide a false layer of credibility to a document that they knew to be false in the Steele dossier.
This is just shocking.
Well, and Steele Didn't do it.
I mean, this is the thing that's so fascinating to me.
Like, they knew explicitly that Steele could not corroborate in early October.
FISA goes ahead on October 21st.
It's amazing.
It's amazing in a terrible way because, as we now know, which we found out during our investigation, but weren't able to talk about for some time, the Steele dossier is in every FISA application involving Carter Page, all four.
The whole thing.
And how can the FBI and the DOJ swear at the top levels of their leadership, the director of the FBI and the Attorney General, put their signatures on that document, on that application, four times over and say, Your Honor, the purpose of our signatures is to attest that we have verified the information in this FISA warrant application and that it is credible to the best of our understanding.
They never once told that court that they were still looking for corroboration and offered Christopher Steele up to a million dollars to corroborate his own work because that's the only source of information they had in that FISA application other than what they call open source reporting.
But they had their circular reporting, which we've talked about in the past, where they, Christopher Steele and the FBI, leaked classified information to the media.
The media would then write a story about look at what Christopher Steele has found.
And the FBI would put in the FISA application.
The Steele dossier is corroborated by this article.
And I think one of which was David Korn, and the other one was in Yahoo News or something like that, saying, look at all this work.
We, the FBI, found it, but then these guys found it on their own.
We caught them running that scam to corroborate their own information by leaking it themselves.
And now we find out, which it doesn't surprise me, but it's still shocking to hear, that they withheld from the court the fact that they were still looking actively to corroborate.
Put aside the million dollar payment.
Let's just put that over there for a second.
They knew they were still looking to corroborate the bulk of the information and they were willing to offer someone seven figures to do it.
That warrant should never have gone to the FISA court.
And still, I have to reiterate this, that the guy who provided the information said, I cannot corroborate it, despite a pretty substantial incentive to do so.
It's mind-blowing.
That's it.
The guy who started, Christopher Steele, who is the originator of the Russia Gate hoax, conspiracy, fraud, whatever you want to call it, based on his dossier, that's the information.
This guy, he said, who has listed sources in the dossier, A, B, C, D, or 1234, whatever it is, he gets called out here by us.
And what the FBI should have done was gone to those sources specifically and said, okay, you're Christopher Steele's source.
We want to talk to you.
That's how you corroborate the credibility of the witness yourself, the source, Steele.
They clearly didn't do that.
What they did was try to take a shortcut offer Steele money, and Steele got caught because if he had it, if he had the goods, if he had the ability to go to these sources and say, hey, where did you get X, Y, and Z?
Of course he would have said, here it is.
And of course I'll take your million dollars.
This is a man, Christopher Steele, who said from the beginning, in his own words, and it's in the Nuna's memo, that he hated Donald Trump and wanted to do everything he could to prevent him from becoming the next president of the United States.
This is the FBI source, Christopher Steele, saying that.
And for a guy who used to run these types of cases, I now can see an even larger problem at the FBI and DOJ in terms of restoring credibility to not just the whole set of the FBI and DOJ caseload, but the specific FISA court application process, which we've discussed at length previously.
But yeah, Christopher Steele, the one man who has no problem lying, who has no problem accepting political donations, who has no problem getting paid by the FBI.
And let's be clear, he was paid by the FBI as a source.
This is an offer on top of his already structured deal with the FBI.
He himself would not provide that information because it did not exist.
And at that time, I mean, Otten is also on record, if I recall in the transcript, saying that Steele is not revealing his sources or just refuses to.
And that's not how you run sources.
If your source won't tell you the root of that information, then you don't use that information.
It's basic FBI 101.
And no prosecutor should ever have allowed that information to go to a court without saying, where did you get this information?
Okay, him.
Okay, where did he get it from?
Oh, he's got four sources.
Did you talk to them?
And then remember how we proved that Christopher Steele hasn't been in Moscow or Russia in like 15 years.
So it's not like he, Christopher Steele, got this information by going at the ground level in Russia.
He was telling the FBI, oh, he's got contacts there from all his great work from decades ago.
And it turns out it was totally false, which we called out.
And we knew the FBI couldn't corroborate because we showed in the Russian Gate investigation these sources and this information was false.
And now we have this to add on top of the FBI's corruption and how they run confidential human sources to yet again cover up their own corrupt activities.
It's just, it is unlawful, totally unlawful.
And why this guy Otten isn't being prosecuted is beyond me.
And I just want to kind of mention this because probably everybody is aware, but it still blows my mind that, you know, this isn't just any kind of investigation.
This is an investigation into the Republican presidential candidates campaign, right, that is being authorized.
So it's, you know, particularly sensitive, one might say.
Well, if you ever had a question as to why their impetus, they being the James Comeys and McCabes and Strzoks of the world, they being the, you know, Rod Rosenstein or his predecessor, Rosenstein signed off on at least one, if not two, of the warrants, but they were started in the Obama administration.
I think Loretta Lynch was the AG or Sal Yates.
I can't remember.
But all of these people's biases have now been borne out.
They claimed back then to have uphold the law and do so without any favor or partisan activity.
We clearly now see from the FBI's own witness testimony in the Danchenko case five years later that they were using their political biases to run an unlawful investigation into a target who happened to be a presidential candidate at the time that they did not like.
And James Comey and others have come to the witness stand and have come to the media repeatedly lying about their intentions.
And I tell America, just look right here.
They got a million more reasons to prove why the FBI was completely corrupt and bankrupt from the inside and out.
You mentioned how this revelation is as big as understanding that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the dossier.
This is a big deal.
So let's talk about our friend Lee Smith for a moment.
And his theory is that the Steele dossier is actually kind of made up of what he called these proto-dosses that were actually created by people that were working with the FBI that had nothing to do with Christopher Steele.
And let's work with that theory for a moment because I think it has a lot of merits.
You can read about it in Lee's second book.
In that sort of a situation, how would this million dollars fit in?
Because clearly, you know, in this case, Steele doesn't have those sources.
And the FBI knows he doesn't.
Right.
Right.
And this according to that theory.
Yeah.
You know, from my perspective as a national security guy, the FBI has a million and one tools to get after investigations.
And if you cannot, and when I could not verify reporting from any source, whoever it was, be it a former government official, be it a current government official, be it just a criminal who was a source or what have you, then your investigation stopped.
You didn't manufacture evidence and go out to the public and say, I'm going to offer a bounty if you can fill my gaps.
That's not how you investigate cases.
You go out and find out where the gaps are.
You fill them with credible information.
And if sources can help you to do that, the sources tell you first the how, the where, the when, the why, and the possible failures of that information.
Then you plug it into your matrix.
And if it upholds the credibility and verification test, then you contract with the source.
And I think what Lee is saying is that the approach that I've just outlined is the 100% wrong approach on how to run investigations at the FBI.
And Lee unveiled in his proto-dossier world how so many of these sources were almost entirely fabricated, partly fabricated, or they were real people, but what they said was totally made up and it was injected by, of all people, the FBI themselves.
And they allowed their circular reporting to verify it and pat themselves on the back, then package all that up and take it to a federal court to surveil a president and a presidential candidate of the United States of America.
Yes, that happened in 2016, and it's apparently happening years and years later.
And we talked about the FBI Conference Human Source Corruption Cover-Up Network last week, and here it is on full display yet again in the Steele world.
This term that I was thinking about in some previous interview comes to mind, which is this perpetual vortex of unreality.
There's so much of this circular passing of information to verify one hand sort of passing to the other hand.
At some point, it just becomes confusing and you don't know what's going on.
It's part of the disinformation that I say that it started with the FBI and DOJ, and then they found a partner in the mainstream media to pump out that disinformation, beginning with Russia Gate, beginning with Christopher Steele.
And then we've seen, as we've covered on our show, the iterations and where this disinformation, this vortex, as you call it, has come into play so often.
And so many people have been sucked into it that they don't know the truth.
They don't know that Donald Trump is not a Russian agent.
That's the fact.
That's it.
There is no other information on planet Earth that proves that because he wasn't.
Everyone investigated it.
We investigated it.
And now we're finding out even more details as to why he wasn't and why the vortex that people were sucked into based on disinformation was totally false.
Because the media had reported, to glorify Christopher Steele, had patted James Comey and his FBI on the back for having the gall to go after President Trump and his campaign for an investigation that they fabricated.
And then the mainstream media went on to win Pulitzer's for pumping out the disinformation vortex.
It's just shocking.
We almost need a new word for how bad this is.
And I know you and I, you know, talk about it every week, or you and I talk about it every day with each other, but you have to step back from a perspective of who is running our government, what happened to our law enforcement community, and how did it become so politicized that these disinformation vortexes are an everyday occurrence.
Maybe if there was something like we made a mistake once every 10 years and we actually made a legitimate, we, the government, made a legitimate mistake, that happens.
This is intentional, unlawful activity by our government partnering with the media to pump out disinformation to falsely portray individuals and movements and beliefs that they don't agree with.
You know, you mentioned a little earlier that this, you know, these new developments in this trial make you look at things in an even more grave way when it comes to the FBI.
So what did you mean by that?
Well, it's just, you know, people think I enjoy, you know, slamming the DOJ and FBI.
I don't.
I wish we were talking about how awesome they were and how they are protecting Americans and how they are going after criminals and how they're making our community safer.
And why I said it was of such a grave concern, this information that was revealed in the Denchenko case this week is because, you know, just when I thought, me, even me, when I thought, okay, we've now got all the RussiaGate information and it was really, really bad, they come out with yet another, as President Trump would say, beauty.
And it just makes you realize, and I hope our audience does too, that this Justice Department and this FBI is not operating anywhere near the level of ethics and lawful behavior that the tens of thousands that work beneath this leadership do every day.
They are ruining these systems, these agencies, these departments, which is why we have talked about how to reform them on other shows.
And the fact, that's what's probably the most sad part for me, for all of it, is that we have to do such a monumental overhaul of our FBI and DOJ because they continue to perform these types of illegal and unlawful activities in America is tragic.
And yet they want the world to look at us and say we're the best.
Right now, this FBI and DOJ are the number one and two reasons why America is not the best.
This is what troubles me so much, frankly, right?
Because in this context of everything that we're seeing, I believe America remains a bit of light in a world that has a lot of darkness that I'm very well aware of, right?
But all this kind of stuff provides a lot of fodder for the dictators of the world to basically point and say, aha, look, look, yet another thing you've done wrong, yet another thing, we can legitimately attack you.
It provides so much fuel for this, you know, their own disinformation and propaganda, right?
China, Russia, and so forth.
Our shining light was supposed to have been wear corruption free.
Everybody else fled their countries of corruption.
Talk about the Soviet Union, talk about dictatorships in Africa and other countries around the world where corruption was rampant, is rampant.
It seems we have transported that corruption into modern-day America and at the FBI and DOJ and the Intel community and DOD, which we've talked about on other episodes.
That's the part that for me is the biggest fail.
That's the one thing I never expected to be talking about about government service is the rampant corruption at the top levels.
And Otten just put it on blast yet again.
So, you know, some people believe that this might be John Durham's last straw.
There's a couple of things.
One is he is prosecuting this himself, which is unorthodox.
And I want to get you to comment on that briefly.
But also, you know, this might be the last opportunity he has.
There's a number of theories to that.
And so some of this information, of course, is very valuable that he's kind of bringing out as part of his process.
But some people have suggested he should just kind of put everything on blast because it's not even clear that he'll win this case.
All these theories have been floating around since John Durham was appointed.
I hope it's not his last prosecution.
You know, it'll definitely be the last one before the calendar year flips and the midterms are coming up.
So it's unlikely that John Durham will do anything between once his verdict comes in.
And as our audience knows, we tape a couple of days before the show airs on Friday night.
So we'll, you know, we'll have a little bit of a gap in terms of updated information.
But I do think he is putting out, like he did in the assessment case, we talked about it extensively.
He put out tons of information that we didn't know about the FBI and DOJ and what I call their unlawful activity.
I think he's doing the same here.
He's just getting going.
This trial is only, we're at, what, day two in terms of our coverage here.
And he's already unleashing this information.
And remember, he's had it for a while.
He figured it out.
That's what you do as a prosecutor.
Get the information and he did it the correct way.
He could have leaked this.
He could have given this story to the media about this million dollars.
It would have been headline news.
But he's doing it the right way.
He kept it in his briefcase, for lack of a better word, and filed it with the court and exposed it at the right time, which is in trial.
Because that is how you afford due process.
As much as I don't like Igor Danchenko, he still has due process under our Constitution, and it would have biased him or prejudiced him had this information leaked beforehand.
And so I think John Durham is running an investigation and continues to do so by the books.
The fact that he's doing it himself, that is very unusual.
A, it's very unusual just to have a special counsel.
B, it's even more unusual.
It's like the attorney general coming in and saying, I'm going to try this case in court.
And I can only speculate as to why that is.
Maybe John Durham felt he just had a grasp of the information so well that he wanted to present it, and that's his right to do so.
And of course, he's an extremely skilled prosecutor, as we're seeing unfold here in this case.
And, you know, that may be the reason.
I don't know.
It'd be pure speculation on my part to say otherwise.
Maybe he didn't have confidence in some members of his team.
I'm not sure.
You know, that's all speculation.
But I think it's pretty cool as a prosecutor, if I'm going to geek out for a minute, to see someone at that level come in and say, I'm going to try this case.
It's pretty neat.
So given everything we've talked about, given everything we know about the FBI, why is Durham making it sound like the FBI in this case is kind of a victim of lying sources?
That's a great question.
So in order to prove the conduct charge, the lying counts, as we call them, to federal officers or federal agents, you have to show this thing called materiality.
And basically, it's not that Durham's putting on a show.
Durham's putting on the facts.
And he's saying that putting the FBI's own corruption aside, that they engineered this whole entire false investigation.
In doing so, this is actually pretty clever of John Durham.
Even while they were basically making this whole thing up, you still can't lie to federal officers.
That's a separate crime.
And John Durham is saying Igor Danchenko, as Christopher Steel's source, came in and lied over and over and over and over and over again.
And he's saying he did it in such a way that it materially altered the course of an investigation.
But remember, at the time, we're talking about 2016, 2017, right?
At the time, we hadn't yet exposed Russia Gate.
These guys thought they were running, well, I believe they knew they were running a false information, but they flied a false flag and pretended to be running this sort of amazing Save America investigation.
So our viewership should keep in mind that we're covering about a six-year span here.
And every time you and I talk about something, I would ask our viewers to put it in the place and time that it occurred and then look at it from that lens through the present day, because that's how you have to view the case that Igor Danchenkov is being prosecuted for.
It's that he lied then and we're able to prove it, and it was materially altering to a significant portion of an ongoing investigation.
Like if Igor Danchenkov had lied about the color of a car that passed by him when he was working as a confidence human source, that would be a lie, but I would argue that's not material.
It didn't alter the FBI's investigation in a major way because of that lie.
And so he would not be guilty of that type of charge.
But what John Durham is laying out is a completely separate case.
So in that instance, yes, it makes the FBI look, I don't want to say like suckers, but makes them look almost the victim, as you put it.
But you have to look at it in the entire light.
They basically are the victims of their own criminal conduct.
They, the FBI, and John Durham as caught up.
Fascinating.
Final question.
This is a Virginia jury.
Yeah.
Right?
And so Ken Durham win.
Yeah, predictions are always tough with jury cases, as we've, you know, we now know, but I've known that for a long time, having tried some 60-some jury cases to verdict.
Yes, I think he can win.
Yes, I think he will win on these charges.
And hopefully that'll show Americans that what we've talked about, which is the DC jury pool can be corrupted.
Just look at the sussman case and not my words, but the juror's own words after the trial, stating flat out that John Durham should never have brought that case in the first place.
And all of these people were shocking Clinton donors.
And that's not supposed to happen.
It shows you how an unfair trial was conducted.
And hopefully this jury will show us what a fair trial looks like.
He only needs to show really that they agree that one of these lies was false.
Yep.
Each count is a felony, I believe, carries up to five years maximum, each count, so five counts over.
And so I believe that's why John Durham will get him on, you know, at least one of these counts.
Well, Cash, I think it's time for our shout out.
It is, Jan.
This week's shout-out goes to Mike and Deborah Lovett.
They are 10 generations deep here in the state of Tennessee, one of the first families of Tennessee.
Thank you for opening up your home to Cassius Corner.
And thanks to everybody who tunes in every week on the live chat, on Truth Social and everywhere else for watching Cassius Corner.
