O n the day Igor Danchenko believes he was betrayed by the U.S. government — when the federal government’s chief law-enforcement officer effectively outed the Russian émigré, then a confidential FBI informant, as the architect of one of the most explosive and controversial documents in American political history — Danchenko was on vacation.
The wiry, voluble man had just arrived at his family’s one-bedroom condo in Ocean City, Maryland, right by the beach and a few hours from their home in northern Virginia. It was shortly after sunset on July 17, 2020, a steamy evening during one of the hottest and most heated U.S.
summers ever: Covid, protests, an ugly presidential campaign. Danchenko unpacked. His daughter and stepdaughter, not yet teenagers at the time, headed to sleep.
His wife, Kristina, reclined on the bed and opened Twitter. She saw the news they’d dreaded the entirety of their relationship. Her heart jumped.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “The 302 transcript is out.” An FD-302 form is how FBI agents summarize an interview.
In this case, it was Danchenko’s initial interview with the FBI. The FBI had learned of Danchenko after BuzzFeed News published the so-called Steele Dossier, a 35-page collection of memos — “unverified, and potentially unverifiable” allegations about President-elect Donald Trump ’s worrisome ties to Russia — only 10 days before Trump was to take office in 2017. Danchenko was the dossier’s primary subsource.
For three da.