John Durham’s latest indictment casts doubt on the origins of the Trump pee tape rumor

• Special counsel John Durham filed a new indictment in his investigation into the FBI's Russia probe.
• It raises more doubts about an unverified allegation involving a rumored Trump pee tape.
• Durham indicted the original source of the rumor and hinted that others did not corroborate his findings.

The special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, dropped a new indictment Thursday that raises questions about the roots of the most salacious allegation in the so-called Steele dossier.

The dossier consists of a series of explosive, unverified memos alleging collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russian government. It was Democratically-funded and first circulated publicly in January 2017. According to the dossier, Russian intelligence officers captured visual evidence of Donald Trump watching Russian prostitutes perform sexual acts involving urination while he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow during a 2013 visit.

The so-called "pee tape" has become a white whale for followers of the various investigations into Trump's connections with Russia. The dossier said the Russian government kept the tape in a file of "kompromat" detailing Trump's "unorthodox behavior" in Russia over the years, and that the Russians had "enough embarrassing material on Trump" to be able to "blackmail him if they so wished."

Numerous investigations, including a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and the Mueller investigation, have not uncovered evidence of such a recording.

Durham's investigation, first launched in 2019 under then-Attorney General William Barr, traced the origins of the allegation. Some of that is detailed in Thursday's indictment against Igor Danchenko, a Russian national and one of former British spy Christopher Steele's main sources for the dossier.

The dossier cited 3 sources connected to the pee tape rumor

The dossier cited an anonymous "Source D" as saying that Trump rented out the presidential suite at the hotel to engage in salacious activity with the prostitutes, and that the hotel was known to be under surveillance by the FSB, Russia's principal internal security agency.

The dossier said that "Source E," described as a "senior (western) member of staff at the hotel," confirmed the episode and said "s/he and several of the staff were aware of it at the time and subsequently." Source F, described as "a female staffer at the hotel when TRUMP had stayed there," also confirmed the story, the dossier said.

Last year, it surfaced that Igor Danchenko, a Russian national who currently resides in the US, was the main source of the allegation involving the pee tape.

He told The New York Times in an October 2020 interview that two sources told him of rumors about a possible Trump sex tape and that two Ritz-Carlton employees later provided him with more nebulous information that he believed corroborated the rumors.

The new indictment casts doubt on Danchenko's reliability

On Thursday, a grand jury indicted Danchenko as part of Durham's investigation and charged him with five felony counts of making false statements to the FBI.

It also raised questions about the veracity of Danchenko's allegations of a Trump pee tape. The indictment cites two sources, PR Executive-1 and Organizer-1, who were knowledgeable about Trump's visit to the Moscow hotel and who themselves visited the venue in June 2016.

While they were at the hotel, the indictment says, the two individuals took a tour of the presidential suite and met with the general manager and other staff members, and they also met with Danchenko. A staff member told participants on the tour that Trump had stayed in the presidential suite, the indictment says.

However, "according to both Organizer-1 and PR Executive-1, the staff member did not mention any sexual or salacious activity," it added.

The indictment alleges that Danchenko lied about his communications with those sources in interviews with the FBI, which made it difficult for the FBI to independently examine those claims. It also says Danchenko lied about other details, like the dates of his visits to the hotel.

Durham's charges against Danchenko follow another charge of lying to the FBI filed against Michael Sussman, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with connections to the Democratic National Committee.

Sussman has denied wrongdoing and has argued that the convoluted nature of the indictment makes it too hard to defend against the charges.

Danchenko appeared to backtrack on the pee tape story in interviews with the FBI, the indictment says.

"DANCHENKO further claimed that he characterized Trump's alleged activity to U.K. Person-1 as 'rumor and speculation,' and that DANCHENKO had been unable to confirm the veracity of the story," the indictment says. UK Person-1 appears to be Steele.

Danchenko also previously acknowledged to The Times that the pee-tape allegation was thin at best and that even he was skeptical of whether it was true. But he added that his job was just to collect "raw intelligence" and he wasn't responsible for how Steele, who was his employer at the time, portrayed it.

Trump dismissed the memos as a "pile of garbage," and he and his Republican allies accused the FBI of fabricating the information to oust Trump from office. In October, Trump without prompting told donors, "I'm not into golden showers."