Indictment of Steele dossier source is more bad news for multiple media outlets

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow in December 2017 aired a special report on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. That document, claimed Maddow, relied on information coming from Steele’s “deep cover sources inside Russia.”

A federal indictment unsealed Thursday has something to say about the quality of those “sources.”

It charges Igor Danchenko, the dossier’s primary intelligence collector, with making false statements to the FBI about his interactions with sources consulted for the dossier. Danchenko isn’t a deep-cover type; he’s a Russian national living in the United States and a former Brookings Institution analyst who “focused on analyzing business and political risks in Russia,” as the New York Times put it.