The Man Behind the Steele Dossier Is Ready to Talk

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 days in January 2017, Danchenko had volunteered to sit down with FBI representatives from Washington, D.C., to break down what he’d learned during a half-dozen trips to Russia the previous year. For the next three years, Danchenko was a paid confidential human informant for the FBI, contributing to dozens of investigations on things like Russian malign-influence efforts and compiling raw reports that were disseminated to the intelligence community.

But until this evening in 2020, his affiliations had remained sealed from the public eye. He’d never been identified as the man who’d provided the majority of the intelligence in the dossier. He hadn’t even known his boss at Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia desk for the British foreign-intelligence agency, had compiled his reports into a dossier. Danchenko had thought his work would remain in the shadows — like it had throughout his career. He assumed it would get passed on to the intelligence community, and perhaps they would investigate it further. But, he says, he was as stunned as anyone when he saw it published on BuzzFeed News.

“That’s the nature of this business, of intelligence work,” Danchenko tells me. “This whole world is built on trust — trust that this is strictly confidential.”

The Steele Dossier has left a permanent imprint on American politics and on the intelligence community. When Danchenko was in Russia digging up rumors on Trump, he says, he didn’t know his work was financed by the Democratic National Committee. He didn’t know it would be compiled into a document that after publication would take on a life of its own. And he certainly didn’t know that document’s afterlife would last years: fueling conspiracy theories on the left and right, feeding Americans’ growing suspicion of opposing political parties, leading to his own indictment and a trial that felt like a proxy trial for America’s intelligence community.

Yet as the Steele Dossier continues to ripple through American politics in another election year, the man at its center sits at home, his life crumbled around him.

As Danchenko and his family settled in for a beach weekend on that July 2020 day, Attorney General Bill Barr, saying it was in the public interest, ordered the FBI to declassify a redacted report from Danchenko’s 2017 interview and hand it over to Sen. Lindsey Graham. Within an hour of the release, the report was made public, despite the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee saying its public release was a gift to Russians and decrying it as the Department of Justice becoming “weaponized.”

The transcript was redacted, but you could tell the number of letters in Danchenko’s blacked-out name: four in his first name, nine in his surname. There were plenty more details for internet sleuths: That the subsource had studied in Russia and the United States, that his Russian hometown had four letters, that he’d participated in a program affiliated with the Library of Congress for emerging leaders from the former Soviet Union.

“All these years, I wasn’t hiding,” Danchenko says. “My social media was all open for people to see. So many open records. It was impossible to shield myself from this. I couldn’t undo my whole life. These details were so particular, so specific — of course it was Igor.”

Danchenko says he texted his FBI handler: “I think this is it.”

The FBI said they shouldn’t park in their normal spot; they moved their SUV a few blocks away. Danchenko and his wife covered the condo’s windows with blankets. They called his ex-wife so their kids could stay with her.

They were terrified for their safety: “I’ve been served on a silver platter to Russian intelligence,” Danchenko recalls. “How often do you get betrayed by the attorney general of the United States, personally? How often does that happen?”

He pulled out his pack of unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and chain-smoked while deleting his digital past. He feared for his sources in Russia — at least a dozen of them, he calculated, could be in serious danger if linked to him. He deleted friends from LinkedIn. He severed ties with a network of hundreds.

Two days later, his name was posted on a blog titled I Found the Primary Subsource. Online sleuths had connected that unredacted report to the Steele Dossier. Immediately, his Foursquare account was hacked. He deleted other accounts, like eBay and Expedia, and cleaned up his social media, deleting hundreds of friends. One of his best friends from his hometown of Perm, a formerly closed-off mining city not far from Siberia, texted that he was in the news. RT, formerly known as Russia Today, had blasted out Danchenko’s photograph.

“You can see life crashing down and everything collapsing,” he recalls.

“I’ve been served on a silver platter to Russian intelligence. How often do you get betrayed by the attorney general of the United States, personally? How often does that happen?”

Soon, it would get worse. He’d be overwhelmed with online death threats — “The Gulag is calling for you” — and people speculating that he would kill himself. He’d be called a Russian spy. Trump name-checked Danchenko at rallies as an example of political corruption. His drinking, long an issue, devolved. The FBI severed ties. Eventually, he’d be indicted for lying to the FBI. His trial would end in acquittal — a semi-redemption that would cost more than $350,000 in legal bills. Without irony, Danchenko refers to his trial with the same words Trump uses when talking of allegations of Russian collusion: “a witch hunt.” He became virtually unemployable in his world of business intelligence and geopolitical analysis.

For the next few days, Danchenko and his wife hunkered down in Ocean City, contemplating their next move. They went for a walk on the beach. The skies darkened. Winds gusted above 20 mph. People rushed away from the sea, beach gear in hand, but Danchenko and Kristina decided on a quick swim before the storm.

Just before they got in the water, they paused, seeing an odd shape on the beach. They walked closer, and it came into focus: a dead shark.

ON A SPRING DAY EARLIER this year, I stride up to Danchenko’s home in a leafy neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. I pass the American flag out front and dozens of seashells on display and knock on the door.

Danchenko answers. I extend my hand.

“It’s a bad omen to shake hands before entering the door,” he warns me.

From the outside, all seems well in the 46-year-old’s life. He was acquitted in 2022 at his trial for lying to the FBI, an embarrassing loss for special counsel John Durham, especially after Trump had said the special counsel was exposing the “crime of the century.” (Durham had been appointed late in the Trump administration to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation; Durham’s final report criticized the FBI for relying on raw, unconfirmed intelligence when it opened the Trump-Russia investigation.) During the trial, doubt was cast on Danchenko’s competence in gathering information used in the Steele Dossier, but FBI witnesses testified that Danchenko told the truth during his time as a confidential informant.

After his acquittal, Danchenko figured his family’s yearslong drama was over. They went on a family vacation to Puerto Rico. He finally became a U.S. citizen. He started a book; his ghostwriter told him he might get a seven-figure advance. His wife focused on her high-paying job as an attorney.

And they moved from their old 1,500-square-foot house, where Danchenko and Kristina slept in a basement with one egress window, to this beauty: more than 6,000 square feet, separate bedrooms for his daughter, stepson, and stepdaughter, a downstairs in-law suite for Kristina’s parents, a music room, a well-appointed kitchen, and a shaded backyard with a gazebo and hammock. 

Who is this man to worry? He could have been in jail. He could have been targeted by Russian operatives. Instead, he sits catlike, curled up on a brown leather couch from their favorite thrift shop, temples starting to gray on his close-cropped hair, sipping one of the dozen coffees he drinks this day. 

But all is not well.

“It ruined him,” says his 13-year-old daughter, Isabella. “It’s what he’s known for. That’s always going to be there for him. And for me, too.”

He and his wife are in marriage counseling. Kristina can no longer talk about the Steele Dossier: “I can’t be your therapist anymore,” she told him after the acquittal. “I feel like I’m being swallowed by all of it.” Consumed by stress, he missed vast parts of his daughter’s childhood. He’s lost 40 pounds off a frame with little to spare; his face looks gaunt. He and his wife lost friends. Viewed as a traitor in his home country, he believes he’ll never be able to return to Russia to visit his aging parents; he missed his grandmother’s funeral last year. (“I’ll never be able to go back there, even if there’s a liberal president,” Danchenko says. “Treason is treason. I’ve committed treason.”) He has often contemplated suicide. He refuses to go on antidepressants because he feels Americans are overmedicated and that they wouldn’t solve his problems, anyway. Trump sued him, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court and Trump was ordered to pay $20,000 in legal fees. (He has yet to pay, Danchenko says. A representative for Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment.) He zeroed out his finances, cashing out his IRA from his time at the Brookings Institution, spending his and Kristina’s savings and their kids’ college funds, selling his flat in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He still owes his attorney $60,000.

Steele tells me he views Danchenko as a “figure of historical importance,” but that can feel hollow to a man who has been out of work since his outing, except for a few small freelance jobs. His confidential sources in Russia and elsewhere dried up. He’s applied for 100 jobs since his acquittal. The job market for a Russian and Eurasian energy analyst is small: research, academia, counterintelligence. Those jobs often require some level of security clearance; to get security clearance, he’d need an employer to sponsor him. “I can’t get someone to sponsor me because of the stigma,” he says. A dozen times in the past year, he estimates, he felt optimistic about a job before the institution simply went dark on him, not even returning emails.

He sees deep irony in this: With Russia’s war in Ukraine and its increasingly menacing stance toward the West, his expertise may be more valuable than ever before.

“Igor doesn’t deserve any of this,” says Fiona Hill, one of Danchenko’s mentors and a Russia specialist who served on the U.S. National Security Council, and who was a key figure in Trump’s first impeachment. “He would have been a really good political-risk analyst.”

Kristina and Danchenko peer at each other from opposite ends of the couch. Money isn’t their biggest problem, they agree, thanks to Kristina’s job. It’s that he’s lost himself.

“Russia, this work, it’s part of his identity,” his wife says.

“I’m chained to this dossier, to Trump,” he says. “And I can’t unlink myself from it.”

“I can’t be your therapist anymore,” his wife Kristina told him after the acquittal. “I feel like I’m being swallowed by all of it.”

His book, Danchenko hoped, could be redemption. But it never sold. Again and again, publishers asked his ghostwriter: Where’s the new dirt on Trump? Another election was coming; his story was rooted in two elections past. 

“Igor,” says an old friend, Baron Bustin, an American petroleum engineer who worked with him in Russia two decades ago, “has been a pawn in this whole thing.”

Back in 2016, when he visited Russia to investigate Trump’s Russia connections, Danchenko had already done scores of jobs for Steele, and the MO was almost always that business intelligence work, governed by nondisclosure agreements, would never become public. 

“He thought, ‘OK, I’ll go to Moscow, dig around a bit,’” says Dr. Charles Ziegler, a political-science professor at the University of Louisville who is a Russia specialist and another of Danchenko’s mentors. “You assume you’re playing a bit part in this play, then all of a sudden the spotlight is on you. It’s very much a Washington tale. It’s a nasty, rough town, worse than it’s been in a long time. This is a story of one young guy who got caught up in it.”

THE RIGHT HAS CALLED Danchenko a Russian spy. The left blames him for the still-unverified (and therefore easily dismissed) information in the Steele Dossier. His own mother, who lives in Russia, believes he’s a double agent. 

The irony is that before Danchenko got caught up in what Trump has long called “the Russia hoax,” he was an Americanophile in the dying days of the Soviet Union, a son of an eye surgeon and an engineer who worked on the Soviet space-shuttle program. The first thing he remembers reading was at four, when Amerika, an American propaganda magazine, published Ronald Reagan’s New Year’s address to the Soviet people. The accompanying portrait showed Reagan sleek, smiling, Hollywood. Danchenko was in love. He attended an elite English-language school where students aspired to work in Soviet foreign affairs. The post-Soviet years were devastating, but at 16, Danchenko’s world opened up with a student-exchange trip to England. He amassed an impressive collection of Western music: Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, Ministry and Pantera. 

He joined a yearlong exchange program and graduated from high school near New Orleans. He returned to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Louisville, then later got another master’s degree at Georgetown University and worked at the Brookings Institution. He achieved some notoriety when he collaborated on a paper showing more than 16 pages in Vladimir Putin’s dissertation were lifted virtually word for word from a 1978 American business-school textbook. (That paper, along with a glowing endorsement from Hill, was why Steele first hired Danchenko.)

His work in D.C. raised the eyebrows of the American intelligence establishment. The FBI opened an espionage investigation looking into allegations that Danchenko had approached a government employee and asked if the employee wanted “to make a little extra money” through access to classified information. (He denies this.) The FBI’s database also revealed Danchenko had contact with the Russian Embassy and Russian intelligence officers, which Danchenko does not deny. The FBI closed the investigation a couple of years later, thinking he’d left the country. At Danchenko’s 2022 trial, an FBI agent testified that allegations of espionage were “hearsay at best,” though Durham hammered him on that point.

Danchenko says he neither worked for a foreign government nor offered anyone money for classified information, and that he didn’t learn the FBI had opened an investigation on him until a decade later, after his outing.

“Someone like myself operating in Washington? I would have been looking at somebody like myself too,” Danchenko explains. “I find it normal. But it doesn’t mean I was a Russian spy.”

After the investigation closed, he began working for Steele. He met Kristina in 2014 at the Russian Embassy in D.C., when he gave a speech on Russian sanctions. They exchanged cards and spoke about taking their daughters, who were the same age, on a playdate. They didn’t get together until the summer of 2016, when Kristina was mid-divorce.

She was intimidated by his intellect. It’s easy to see why. When Danchenko and I sift through books at his favorite thrift shop, he’s thrilled to find a 1928 edition of Hamlet for $1. He quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be.” 

The evening of Sept. 24, 2016, was their first official date. Kristina waited inside Lupo Verde, an Italian restaurant near Logan Circle, looked out the window and saw Danchenko finishing a phone call.

On the other line was Steele. The two were discussing information that would soon become infamous.

BEFORE STEELE CAME TO HIM IN 2016 to root around about Trump, Danchenko had done a litany of jobs for Steele’s company: business intelligence, litigation support, Kremlinology. He utilized his deep knowledge of the oil-and-gas worlds in Russia and former satellite states, having worked as an attorney in the energy sector and construction industry in both Russia and Iran, where he lived for two years. He was always discreet, never posing for pictures with celebrities, but he was often alongside the powerful, telling me he’s met Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Dmitry Medvedev, along with Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton.

“He delivers high-quality work that checks out, and he conducts himself discreetly,” Steele tells me. “Often it would be talking to people he knew already. It was his Russian-ness, but also him being an energy expert. He had a solid track record. Clients didn’t challenge his reporting.”

Business intelligence is more intellectual work, Danchenko says, though it sometimes gets down to cloaks and daggers. He refuses to go into many specifics about the Steele Dossier or other jobs, honoring the secrecy that governs that world. He and Steele both speak of his work in broad brushstrokes. Like the time Danchenko was physically threatened while on a job in a far-flung Russian province, or when a corrupt Russian customs officer forced him to go to a cash machine and pay a bribe. One of his first assignments with Steele was investigating the political exposure and organized-crime exposure of a major tobacco company. He had an insightful conversation with a source in a regional Russian capital. Then some other guys came into the restaurant, which, of course, was dimly lit. They threatened to break his legs. “Good luck with your research,” they said before leaving.

“You just have to ride with it,” Steele says, “take the rough with the smooth.”

In meetings with sources, Danchenko would conceal his ultimate intentions, saying he was in Russia to work on an academic article and visit family. He’d ask one leading question but never a second. He’d share information, too; foreign sources were always interested in picking the brain of a D.C. insider.

Fusion GPS was paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to do opposition research on Trump. By June 2016, that company subcontracted with Orbis, Steele’s private-investigation firm, to dig into Trump’s Russian connections because of Steele’s firm’s deep intelligence connections there.

“I went with Igor because by that stage he’d built up a really impressive network, and people were unburdening themselves to him, confiding things to him they probably shouldn’t have,” Steele says. “We didn’t think we’d find much — a few bribes maybe. We had no idea it would be like this. He came back with such striking, impactful material on the first trip he did, we decided to carry on.”

Before one of his 2016 Russia trips, Danchenko went on the Trump campaign website and purchased five “Make America Great Again” hats. What a perfect political souvenir to bring to Russia, he thought. He’d be at a bar with a source, talking about the privatization of the Russian oil company Rosneft or about pending Russian laws affecting foreign investment, and Danchenko would steer the conversation to the U.S. political struggle. They’d talk about Trump and rumors of his Russian connections. Then Danchenko would produce a MAGA hat as a gift for the politically-connected Russian.

He admits to naivete going into the job that led to the Steele Dossier. He says he didn’t even know the phrase “opposition research” at the time, a shocking oversight. He thought investigating Trump was like any other research project: Find out what influential Russians were talking about and report back. Sussing out the veracity of what he collected was always up to the agency — his job was to gather. 

Then, on a January 2017 night when he and Kristina were having a picnic with their kids on the floor of his D.C. apartment, BuzzFeed News released the dossier, which was made up of what Danchenko estimates was 80 percent material he’d collected. (Steele had given a copy of the dossier to David Kramer, an aide to Sen. John McCain, to pass on to the late senator, and Kramer leaked it to BuzzFeed. Steele tells me he blames Kramer for the “unsanitized” document being published, calling it a betrayal.)

“And onto it were imposed all these fantasies of liberal media and of conservative media,” Danchenko says.

He immediately knew how dangerous his situation was. So did Steele.

“The nightmare was that he would have been deported back to Russia if Trump identified who he was,” Steele says. “He was very vulnerable to Russia: to retaliation, to being deported. That was a major concern. I’m living in my own country. That’s a different scenario. Everyone was freaking out, but he was certainly freaking out.”

The dossier painted a complex picture of the Trump campaign’s alleged connections with Russia. Danchenko knew the public wouldn’t digest the information with the nuance he would have wanted: “It’s not about putting somebody in jail. It’s about understanding. These goals transcend politics. But it took on a life of its own and became sort of a symbol.”

He knew the rumors and innuendo he’d reported about the Trump campaign’s Russia connections were volcanic. But he never imagined the depth to which it would penetrate the American psyche. He never imagined how the right would weaponize it as evidence of the ineptitude and politicization of the U.S. intelligence community. He never expected his intelligence would become such catnip to the left and liberal news outlets like MSNBC: “Trump is in a way a victim of this media world,” Danchenko says. “They choose to publish these bits of raw intelligence without giving thought to analyzing or fact-checking. Media with all this hype, media trying to outcompete each other. There’s a serious national-security issue here, a serious investigation. [But] it’s just, ‘Who is going to publish the bigger scoop with the most likes and retweets?’”

Frederic Lemieux, faculty director of the master’s program in applied intelligence at Georgetown University, doesn’t point to one main culprit in the Steele Dossier. He blames everyone involved: Certainly Danchenko, who Lemieux believes should have been more mindful about the possibility of being fed deliberate misinformation as part of a Russian counterintelligence operation, and should have been more transparent about the reliability of his sources. But also Steele for disseminating the dossier, the media for feeding into the frenzy without corroboration, the intelligence community for relying so heavily on a single source — Danchenko — and using that information in erroneous applications for warrants to conduct surveillance on Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, and the Trump campaign for having such deep connections with Russia, whether nefariously or just incompetently.

“They all played a key part, willingly or not,” Lemieux says. “The intelligence community knew better than to use one source as a main contributor to their intelligence assessment. They should have learned that from WMD stuff [the flawed intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq]. But they were in a rush. We had a candidate suspected to be the Manchurian Candidate. People are rushing to see if the state is compromised. I can see that, but they really cut corners.”

“Everyone wanted to believe what they already believed,” Lemieux continues. “It’s confirmation bias. That’s the big lesson. There was too much information that was unsupported or never validated.”

The irony? The leak of the dossier, meant to warn the U.S. of the influence Russia may have over the incoming U.S. president, ended up furthering Putin’s goal of sowing discord and disagreement in American society.

Danchenko still believes most of the dossier’s rumors were correct, and that the overall theme of Trump’s suspect connections to Russia was spot on. This goes against what’s been reported about the dossier. The sourcing, according to The New York Times, was “thin and sketchy,” with one key allegation about Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen meeting with Russian officials in Prague during the 2016 campaign having been proved false. The CIA intelligence analyst who wrote the first draft of the 2017 intelligence-community assessment of Russian election meddling — which concluded that Putin ordered the interference to help Trump — told Rolling Stone this summer that the Steele Dossier was “garbage” and “a joke.” And in the seven years since it was released, nobody has stepped forward to corroborate other details. (Danchenko points to the 2020 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report about Russian interference as vindication. He says his role was merely to report back with information he found, not to prove that information as demonstrably true; the burden of proof in raw intelligence, he says, is not the same as the burden of proof for a court case. “It’s not about trying to prove somebody a spy and jail them for life,” he says. “It’s about understanding.”)

And yet, Danchenko still believes — despite never having viewed it, despite his evidence really only being rumors and innuendo that he gathered but that many discredit — that there’s a pee tape.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT the pee tape?

It’s almost certainly the one thing you remember from the Steele Dossier.

The rumor Danchenko says he heard during his half-dozen trips to Russia in 2016 goes like this: It was 2013, not long after President Obama had humiliated Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an event some point to as Trump’s motivation to run for president. Trump, in Russia for the Miss Universe contest, was staying in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton. It was the same suite Barack and Michelle Obama once stayed in. Trump was with some powerful Russian oligarchs, who brought the sex workers.

According to Danchenko, several sources in Russia — sources he still won’t reveal — told him rumors about what Trump did next: He instructed the sex workers to pee on the bed. (Trump denied this in a press conference after the dossier was posted saying he would’ve known there would be cameras in his hotel, and added, “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.” And there’s been no other corroboration or evidence supporting Steele’s account.)

“We didn’t think we’d find much — a few bribes maybe,” Christopher Steele says about Danchenko’s work on the dossier. “We had no idea it would be like this.”

“They kind of had a laugh about it,” Danchenko continues. “To me it sounds like this stupid college prank. But it also symbolized to me — at the time, certainly — this sort of strange, perverted closeness that Trump, before he became a candidate, established with certain important politically-exposed individuals in Russia.”

In hindsight, Danchenko and other colleagues wonder if including these details — on the second page of the 35-page dossier — was wise. The pee tape hijacked the dialogue of serious allegations about Russian influence with huge geopolitical importance.

The American response was predictable: All nuance was lost. The obsession with the pee tape, Danchenko believes, diverted focus from a more substantive conversation.

As we talk, Danchenko smokes a cigarette on a bench near his daughter’s old elementary school. The perfect spring day is punctuated by sounds of a nearby coach-pitch youth baseball game.

I ask what parts of Trump’s Russian connections he wished America had focused on. He brings up Aras Agalarov, the billionaire Azerbaijani real-estate developer with deep ties to Trump.

“Construction business is big business, and it’s highly criminal everywhere,” Danchenko says. “There’s all kinds of kickbacks. Nobody gets anything for nothing. You think this school was built without kickbacks? Who’s the contractor of this school? How did the contractor win the contract? An open and fair process? Not necessarily.”

“Certainly there is corruption,” Danchenko continues. “How big was it in the case of Trump and the Agalarovs and Putin? Is that the real pee tape? I still think there’s some leverage they hold against Trump. You want to call it pee tape? Call it pee tape.” (Agalarov has denied his dealings with Trump were on behalf of Putin.)

A few weeks after I visit Danchenko and his family, Trump is convicted of 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial. Danchenko is disheartened by reactions on both sides: liberals celebrating and joking about the conviction of a former president, conservatives slamming it as political persecution. 

He sees a parallel to his own trial: Neither trial was really about what prosecutors purported them to be about. Danchenko’s trial was, he felt, a proxy trial for the FBI and Justice Department; Danchenko was the scapegoat. Trump’s trial didn’t captivate the public because of his company’s falsified ledgers. Like the pee tape, it captivated the public with sex. And in both cases, Danchenko says, the American imagination focused on the wrong things.

“What surprised me is how the other stuff was also normalized,” he says. “The Russia-collusion stuff. They normalized it. By going after me, and painting me as this idiot, this villain, a Clinton crazy ally, they deflected everyone from the real story to the point that nobody talks about collusion anymore. It’s like it never happened. I understand years go by and things become less relevant with time. But they’ve normalized it to the point where it’s like, ‘So what?’”

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Danchenko took a trip to London. He brought Kristina’s parents and showed them around — Hyde Park and St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London — and scheduled a few business meetings.

One of those meetings was with Steele. It was the first time he’d seen Steele since his public outing. Kristina wanted her husband to give Steele hell in person. Danchenko wasn’t so sure. Despite everything, he still had warm feelings for his old boss. He’d subcontracted with him for more than a decade. And frankly, he needed work.

The meeting with Steele and the company’s co-founder was tense, Danchenko says.

“I told them I had multiple occasions I could go after the FBI, go after you — I never fucking did,” he recalls. “And I’m minus a half-million [dollars] and a few years of my life over this. My kids lost their childhoods over this. You have your pensions, your lives. And I don’t.”

Danchenko says he hasn’t given up, not on work and not in life. But at his home outside D.C., he remains inert and emasculated. He posts on LinkedIn. He cleans the house and mows the lawn. He hasn’t had a drink since shortly after his acquittal. He is learning Dutch. He fears further retribution if Trump wins, wondering if they’ll have to flee the country.

Over the past year, I’ve had a dozen or so phone calls with Danchenko, often lasting late into the night. He’s sent me countless text messages that go on for pages. I spent several days with him and his family at their home in the spring. I’ve come to see his idle position as someone with an unemotional, cynical attitude toward the world: sifting through propaganda, reading between lines, seeing nuance in a world of black and white. As his friend, Bustin, tells me, “Igor never tells you in simple terms what the hell’s going on — he talks in riddles and in circles.” It can prove frustrating.

The only time I see his deep sadness come to the surface is when he stands in his kitchen one afternoon, discussing one FBI witness’ testimony during his trial. Suddenly, his voice breaks. He’s almost heaving, continuing to speak while trying to catch his breath. His cheeks dampen with tears.

It isn’t because he’s recounting how much this debacle has taken from his life. It’s because that FBI witness had testified in a federal courtroom to his value to the FBI: That he’d never had an informant with such a vast network. That he’d reshaped how the United States perceived outside threats. 

Goosebumps stand on Danchenko’s arm as he recounts this moment: Validation that his work had meant something.

When Kristina met Danchenko, he seemed like a man who was going places, with speaking engagements and television appearances and overseas meetings.

“That’s gone now. Gone,” Kristina tells me. “Sometimes he says to me, ‘I’m not the man you fell in love with.’ I don’t care how much money he would make. Any job where he would use his education and knowledge and skills — even if it makes $20,000 a year, I would be so happy. Anything where he could feel like all of this was not forgotten.”

After their meeting in London, Danchenko texted Steele a long note of thanks. Steele promised he’d try to do his best to support him, personally and professionally. Soon, Danchenko would find his first meaningful freelance work since his outing. Perhaps it would be the beginning of his career’s resurrection. Danchenko wasn’t holding out hope.

“Yes, Iggy old friend,” Steele texted back. “It was a difficult but informative conversation. We have all suffered greatly through the last 8 years, you probably most of all …”

“Love to Kristina and the family.”