Hillary Clinton's Former Aide Enters Spotlight After Arrest of Source for Steele's Trump Dossier

On 4 November, US Special Counsel John Durham's investigation indicted a Russia-born analyst instrumental in concocting parts of the notorious Steele Dossier. The latter allowed the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on a Trump aide in 2016.

A former Hillary Clinton aide might be at the epicentre of an indictment filed on Thursday by the Durham investigation against Igor Danchenko, one of the analysts behind the infamous Steele Dossier. The indictment repeatedly refers to "PR-Executive 1" as one of the main sources for the dossier's allegations, coined by Danchenko, without explicitly naming the person. However, the The New York Times identified the person as Charles Dolan Jr., whose career description matched that of "PR-Executive 1" as per the indictment's text.

Dolan was a senior strategist at the PR firm Kglobal, when he was first contacted by Danchenko, who was seeking a "potential business collaboration" for his "project against Trump". At the same time, Dolan served as an adviser for Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent in the 2016 elections, and during her unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

Hillary Clinton's former aide, prior to his work with Danchenko, had been building up ties with Russia as he handled "global public relations" for Moscow and Russian energy giant Gazprom during his tenure at the PR company Ketchum, Durham's indictment shows. The indictment further noted that some of the people Dolan presumably worked with in Russia later emerged in the Steele Dossier, specifically the portions believed to have been contributed by Danchenko.

The Russia-born analyst contacted Dolan as early as April 2016. In August, he asked the ex-Clinton aide for info on Paul Manafort, who abruptly left Trump's campaign. In his response, Dolan told Danchenko he met "a GOP friend", who spilled the dirt on Manafort's resignation. In fact, the indictment says, Dolan fed the analyst a concocted lie, since his information was based on reports he had heard in the media, not the confessions of a GOP source.

"I think the bottom line is that in addition to the Ukraine revelations, a number of people wanted [Manafort] gone. It is a very sharp elbows crowd", Dolan summed up the purported accounts of a "GOP source" referring to the scandal about Manafort's ties to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

At the same time, Danchenko retells Dolan's account of the events nearly verbatim, but cites the source as "an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign".

The ex-Clinton aide became the main source of information for the analyst in the portion of the dossier dedicated to Paul Manafort's resignation. Yet, Danchenko deliberately misled the FBI in 2017, denying he had spoken with Dolan about anything that made it into the dossier, Durham's indictment said.

Danchenko was indicted on 4 November on several accounts of lying to the FBI as part of an investigation led by Special Counsel John Durham. The latter was appointed by then-US President Donald Trump to investigate the probe the FBI had opened into Trump's campaign in 2016.

The bureau justified the probe with since-disproved allegations of collusion between the GOP candidate's campaign and the Russian government. The FBI even led months-long surveillance on one of the members of his campaign, Carter Paige. The law enforcement agency received and extended a FISA warrant to spy on him using the findings from the notorious dossier, parts of which ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele provided to the FBI, before leaking it to the press.