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      U.S. Indicts Iranian Hackers in Voter Intimidation Effort

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      The hackers are accused of sending threatening messages to thousands of people after breaking into voter registration systems and a media company.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers on Thursday for seeking to influence the 2020 election with a clumsy effort to intimidate voters, just a day after the nation’s cyberdefense authorities warned of an escalating Iranian effort to insert malicious code into the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure.The hackers, identified in a grand jury indictment handed up in New York as Seyyed Kazemi, 24, and Sajjad Kashian, 27, are accused of sending threatening messages to several thousand voters, after breaking into some voter registration systems and at least one media company. Many of the messages sent by the Iranians were designed to look like they were from the Proud Boys, the right-wing extremist group.Law enforcement officials said Facebook messages and emails from the Iranians to Republicans falsely claimed the Democrats were planning to exploit security vulnerabilities in state voter databases to register nonexistent voters. But the hackers also sent tens of thousands of emails to Democrats. They demanded recipients change their party affiliation and vote for President Donald J. Trump.The emails were so badly written, however, that they immediately seemed suspect, and the effort was quickly exposed by Mr. Trump’s own administration. Intelligence officials have long considered the emails to Democrats to be a bit of ham-handed reverse psychology, meant to make the recipients more likely to turn out to vote against Mr. Trump.Law enforcement officials also revealed Thursday that the Iranians had hacked into a media company that provides a content management system for dozens of newspapers, although officials did not reveal the name of the organization.Had they kept access, they might have been able to post fake stories to undermine the election, law enforcement officials said. But the F.B.I. detected the intrusion and notified the company. When the Iranians tried to enter the system the day after the election, they discovered their access was blocked.While the timing seemed coincidental, the indictment was announced after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a bulletin on Wednesday warning of a broad, state-sponsored Iranian campaign to get into American computer networks, including hospitals. The warning was a rare one: The governments of Australia and Britain joined in issuing it, and said that a number of ransomware attacks were being organized by the Iranian government, not just criminal groups.Taken together, the indictment and the warning suggest that the Iranian government is making broader use of its offensive cyber-units, and learning from techniques it is picking up from Russia and elsewhere. The warning did not name which American hospitals or transportation systems were the focus of Iranian attacks.“Our intelligence officials have continually warned that other countries would seek to follow Russia’s 2016 playbook,’’ Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement after the indictment was announced. “Today’s charges and sanctions against several Iranians believed to be behind a cyber campaign to intimidate and influence American voters in the 2020 election are further evidence that attempts to interfere in our elections will continue, and we must all be on guard against them.”The indictment Thursday did not directly state that the two men were working for the Iranian government. Instead, they were employed by a cybersecurity firm that claims to do defensive work for the Iranian government. But U.S. officials have long contended that several such companies focus on offensive cyber activities — from theft of data to sabotaging of networks, often directed at the U.S.In the election case, previously declassified intelligence reports have linked the efforts to Tehran’s government ministries, and suggested that Iran was attempting to use variations of the playbook designed by Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 election.In 2016 and in 2020, intelligence officials concluded Russia was trying to influence the election to benefit Mr. Trump. And while Thursday’s indictment did not specify the goal of the Iranian hackers — beyond sowing divisions among Americans — intelligence officials have repeatedly said that Iranian influence efforts were aimed at hurting Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts.“This indictment details how two Iran-based actors waged a targeted, coordinated campaign to erode confidence in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system and to sow discord among Americans,” Matthew G. Olsen, who recently took over as head of the National Security Division of the Justice Department, said. “The allegations illustrate how foreign disinformation campaigns operate and seek to influence the American public.”Officials said that the Treasury Department would impose sanctions related to the charges, and rewards would likely be set up for information that would enable the U.S. to arrest the two indicted hackers. But the men are in Iran, and the best officials can hope for is to get them arrested and extradited if they travel outside the country.In a speech earlier this week, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, said one of the main lessons of the government’s 2020 election defense efforts was that multiple foreign governments had tried to influence the outcome.Intelligence officials have said that Russia, Iran and China mounted the biggest efforts to influence American politics in 2020, although Cuba also pushed narratives to denigrate Mr. Trump, the March intelligence report found.“What did we learn? That we had more adversaries. We had more committed adversaries,” General Nakasone said.Other intelligence officials have noted that Russia appeared to hold back from the kind of tactics it used in 2016; instead, the SVR, one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies, focused on the SolarWinds infiltration, altering a type of software used by thousands of companies and government agencies. That gave them access to a far larger group of targets — a technique that China and other countries are also using. More

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      What the Steele Dossier Reveals About the FBI

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      This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Project Veritas Tells Judge It Was Assured Biden Diary Was Legally Obtained

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      But a search warrant in the case suggests the Justice Department believes the diary kept by the president’s daughter Ashley Biden was stolen.Project Veritas, the conservative group under scrutiny in a Justice Department investigation of how a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden was published days before the 2020 election, has told a federal judge that it received a diary from two people who said they had legally obtained it after she had abandoned it.“Project Veritas had no involvement with how those two individuals acquired the diary,” lawyers for the group said in a letter dated Wednesday to a federal judge in New York. The group’s lawyers were asking U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres for a so-called special master to determine what materials seized by federal investigators could be used as evidence in their investigation.Using initials for the individuals who the lawyers said approached the group with the diary, the lawyers said the group’s “knowledge about how R.K. and A.H. came to possess the diary came from R.K. and A.H. themselves.”In contrast with Project Veritas’s description in the letter of how the diary was obtained, a warrant used by federal authorities to search the home of the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, last Saturday indicated that federal authorities believed the property was stolen.The proceedings in the case have been sealed, but a producer for Fox News provided The New York Times with a copy of the letter written by the Project Veritas lawyers and its attachments, including a copy of the search warrant. The producer was seeking comment from The Times about allegations in the letter that the Justice Department had leaked news of the searches to the Times.Judge Torres ruled on Thursday that the government should refrain from examining the materials it obtained in the search, including from Mr. O’Keefe’s cellphones, until she decides whether to appoint a special master, according to a ruling from the judge posted on Twitter by a Project Veritas lawyer. The judge set a schedule for the government and Project Veritas to provide her with more information in the coming days, and indicated that she is unlikely to rule for at least a week.The F.B.I. executed search warrants last week at the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two former employees for the group.Project Veritas never ended up publishing Ms. Biden’s diary. It was made public less than two weeks before the 2020 election by a right-wing website that posted several photographs of diary pages it claimed were written by Ms. Biden. The website said it had obtained the diary from a “whistle-blower” who worked for a media organization that had decided not to publish a story on the topic. The search warrant provided some sense of the specific questions the government is seeking to answer in its investigation related to Project Veritas, which has previously said it purchased the diary.According to the search warrant — which described Ms. Biden’s property as “stolen” — the government said it was looking for any evidence Mr. O’Keefe had about how Ms. Biden’s property was obtained and whether Ms. Biden was surveilled before the property was taken.The government also said it was seeking any communications that the group prepared to send to Ms. Biden, Mr. Biden and others about her property.The government said in the search warrant that among the crimes it was investigating were conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, conspiracy to possess stolen goods and transporting stolen property across state lines.Project Veritas has sought to portray itself as a news media organization that made a journalistic decision not to publish the diary, suggesting it is being targeted by the Biden Justice Department and that federal investigators disclosed the existence of the searches to a reporter for The Times.“This leaked information likely was intended to preemptively deflect criticism that the D.O.J. was being used to target a news organization viewed by some as critical of the Biden administration over the matter of President Biden’s daughter’s diary,” the Project Veritas lawyers said in their letter.They added: “Members of the news media like Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas depend on an atmosphere of confidence and trust. If the government may, pursuant to a search warrant, fully examine a reporter’s electronic devices — which include information and communications with government critics, watchdogs and whistle-blowers — then the truth-seeking function of the press will wither.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      F.B.I. Searches James O’Keefe’s Home in Ashley Biden Diary Theft Inquiry

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      Authorities carried out a court-ordered search at the New York apartment of the Project Veritas founder two days after searching the homes of his associates.Federal authorities on Saturday searched the home of James O’Keefe, the founder of the conservative group Project Veritas, according to witnesses and people briefed on the matter, a day after Mr. O’Keefe acknowledged that the group was under investigation by the Justice Department in connection with a diary reported to have been stolen from Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter.The F.B.I. carried out a court-ordered search of Mr. O’Keefe’s apartment in Mamaroneck, N.Y., early on Saturday morning, after having searched the homes of two associates of Mr. O’Keefe on Thursday as part of the investigation.An F.B.I. spokesman on Saturday said that agents had “performed law enforcement activity” at the building, but would not discuss the investigation.Mr. O’Keefe did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. But in a video statement on Friday, he said that his group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources last year about the diary.Jimmy Maynes, who lives next to Mr. O’Keefe at an apartment complex in Mamaroneck, said a handful of F.B.I. agents arrived early Saturday morning.“They asked for James,” Mr. Mayne, an entertainment manager, said. “I thought they were banging on my door. I opened the door.”“They told me to close the door and I closed the door,” he added. “That’s exactly what happened. It was still dark.”Brent Mickol, a teacher who lives across the hall from Mr. O’Keefe, said it was about 6 a.m. when agents arrived. Mr. Mickol said the agents said “something along the lines of ‘F.B.I. Warrant. Open up.’”“I ran to the door and looked out the peep hole and clearly saw an F.B.I. raid,” he said. “You saw the jackets. Literally, it was just out of a movie.”Mr. Maynes and Mr. Mickol said the F.B.I. agents were at the apartment for several hours.In his video statement on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists, had turned the diary over to the law enforcement authorities last year and had sought to return it to a lawyer for Ms. Biden.“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said in the video statement. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right-wing website last year a week and a half before Election Day, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son Hunter as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother.The Trump administration’s Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.On Thursday, federal authorities searched the residence in Manhattan of Spencer Meads, a longtime Project Veritas operative and confidant of Mr. O’Keefe, and an apartment in Mamaroneck linked to another O’Keefe associate.Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor groups, news media organizations and others. The group conducts sting operations using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address. More

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      People Tied to Project Veritas Scrutinized in Theft of Diary From Biden’s Daughter

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      The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right wing website.The Justice Department searched two locations associated with the conservative group Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election, according to people briefed on the matter.Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said, referring to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.The Trump administration Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations, news media and others. The group conducts sting operations, using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.Project Veritas has a pending libel suit against The New York Times over a 2020 story about a video the group made alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother. In 2019, Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine at the same time he pressured that country’s president for support in investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.President Biden hugged his daughter, Ashley, after he was sworn in last year.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAn F.B.I. spokesman in New York would not comment on the investigation, saying only that agents had “performed law enforcement activity related to an ongoing investigation” at two locations. One of the searches took place in an apartment on East 35th Street near the Midtown Tunnel and the other in Mamaroneck, N.Y., north of New York City.A spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.In Manhattan, a neighbor a floor above the apartment that was searched on East 35th Street said she was woken out of her sleep early Thursday morning by agents pounding on a door and repeatedly shouting “Open Up!” and “F.B.I.!”“I thought it was a joke,” said the neighbor, Mychael Green, 23. “For 10 minutes they were knocking on his door obviously really loud,” and eventually forced their way into the apartment, Ms. Green said. Hours later, the doorjamb was clearly broken and the door was hanging ajar.Spencer Meads, the longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, has lived in that apartment since 2019, according to public records.Ms. Green said that the agents were yelling “Spencer, open up!”A former Project Veritas employee said that Mr. Meads had been involved in recruiting operatives. A website that tracks Project Veritas operatives said that Mr. Meads had also been involved in undercover operations for the group.Mr. Meads did not respond to an email and a text message seeking comment.The Justice Department finds itself in a highly unusual situation in regards to Mr. Biden’s children. Not only is it investigating the case of Ms. Biden’s diary, but Hunter Biden disclosed last year that Justice Department prosecutors in Delaware were investigating his taxes.The pages were posted online under the byline of Patrick Howley, a reporter who has worked for several conservative outlets in recent years. He was the first to disclose a yearbook photo from the page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia that showed one individual in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another individual in blackface.Mr. Howley also disclosed damaging text messages between Cal Cunningham, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina, and a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.While the disclosure of Ms. Biden’s diary was largely ignored, some far right outlets and supporters of Mr. Trump jumped on the news of the diary as further evidence that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president. Alex Jones, a prominent far right radio host, brought up the diary on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.Mr. Trump used Twitter to send or promote positive comments about Project Veritas at least six times in the last two years of his presidency. Mr. Trump boosted Project Veritas content even before he became president, and shortly after he announced his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. O’Keefe visited Trump Tower and showed Mr. Trump footage he was intending to release to damage Hillary Clinton, the most likely Democratic nominee.In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, using a fake name, fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.Democracy Partners later sued Project Veritas. In a ruling last month in the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said that Democracy Partners could refer to the conduct by Project Veritas as a “political spying operation” in the upcoming trial.Kitty Bennett and Matthew Cullen contributed research. More

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      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

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      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More

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      FBI Raids Homes Linked to Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska

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      Agents investigating whether Oleg Deripaska violated U.S. sanctions searched homes he has used in New York and Washington, D.C.Agents raided homes that Oleg V. Deripaska had used in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row, as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions the United States imposed on him.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressF.B.I. agents on Tuesday morning searched homes linked to the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions imposed on him by the United States, according to people with knowledge of the matter and a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska.The searches were carried out more or less simultaneously by agents in New York and Washington and were part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the people said.Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and was convicted in 2018 of financial fraud and other crimes.A spokesman for the F.B.I. office in New York would say only that the agents were “conducting a law enforcement operation pursuant to a law enforcement investigation,” and did not provide details on the nature or scope of the inquiry. A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment.But a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska issued a statement confirming the searches, and saying that the investigation was related to U.S. sanctions.“The F.B.I. is carrying out a search at two houses — located in Washington and New York — belonging to Mr. Deripaska’s relatives,” said the spokeswoman, Larisa Belyaeva. “The searches are being carried out on the basis of two court orders, connected to U.S. sanctions.”The agents searching the Greenwich Village house arrived in the early morning hours in about half a dozen SUVs and were seen leaving the building carrying several large flat rectangular boxes like those used to transport paintings.The raid on the home in Washington was reported earlier by NBC News.In 2018, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against Mr. Deripaska and his mammoth aluminum company, saying he had profited from the “malign activities” of Russia around the world. In announcing the sanctions, the Trump administration cited accusations that Mr. Deripaska had been accused of extortion, racketeering, bribery, links to organized crime and even ordering the murder of a businessman.Mr. Deripaska denied the allegations supporting the sanctions, and his allies contended that the sanctions were punishment for refusing to play ball with the Americans.The Trump administration lifted the sanctions against Mr. Deripaska’s companies in 2019 under an agreement intended to reduce his control and ownership, though a confidential document showed the deal may have been less punitive than advertised, leaving him and his allies with majority ownership of his most important company.Weeks later, Mr. Deripaska unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government to overturn the sanctions on him, alleging they were levied without due process and were based on unproven smears that fell outside the sanctions program.In the lawsuit, Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers claimed that the sanctions had cost him billions of dollars, made him “radioactive” in international business circles, and exposed him to criminal investigation and asset confiscation in Russia.The sanctions restrict his ability to own property or do business in the United States.Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel to the United States has also been restricted in the past, though he had managed visits to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii before the sanctions, people familiar with his travel said.And he has also been a subject of investigations by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn for several years, according to people with knowledge of those inquiries, but it is unclear whether the searches have any connection to those matters.The oligarch also came under scrutiny from the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, because of his connections to Mr. Manafort.Mr. Deripaska hired Mr. Manafort and signed his firm to a $10-million-a-year contract in 2006 at least partly to help him with his visa, which the U.S. government revoked. Mr. Deripaska eventually fired Mr. Manafort and his partner and later sued them over an unsuccessful telecommunications venture they had pursued together.Mr. Deripaska was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016.Evgenia Novozhenina/ReutersBut after Mr. Manafort joined Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, he instructed his deputy to periodically provide confidential Trump campaign polling data to an associate that the deputy understood would be shared with Mr. Deripaska, according to a report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the campaign, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant, signaling that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States in exchange for information on possible Russian aid to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Deripaska told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Kremlin collusion in the campaign.Property records show that the homes searched by the F.B.I. on Tuesday — a sprawling mansion in an affluent neighborhood in Northwest Washington and a three-story historic Greenwich Village townhouse that was once a speakeasy called the Pirate’s Den and later home to Mayor Jimmy Walker’s paramour — are owned by opaque limited liability corporations.The L.L.C. that owns the Greenwich Village property is connected to a person identified in British court filings as a cousin of Mr. Deripaska.Nate Schweber More

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      Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska Indicted in Campaign Finance Case

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      Representative Jeff Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska, was accused of lying to F.B.I. agents investigating illegal foreign donations. He said he would fight the charges.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday charged a Republican member of Congress from Nebraska with lying to the F.B.I. during a campaign finance investigation, an allegation that the lawmaker vowed to fight.The Justice Department accused the lawmaker, Representative Jeff Fortenberry, of lying to the F.B.I. twice about whether he knew that he had received illegal campaign donations, including during an interview with the government that his lawyer attended, according to the federal indictment.Anticipating that the department intended to charge him, Mr. Fortenberry said in a video posted online on Tuesday morning that F.B.I. agents unexpectedly came to his home two years ago to question him about the possibility that he had received illegal campaign donations.“I told them what I knew and what I understood,” Mr. Fortenberry said. “They’ve accused me of lying to them and are charging me with this.” He called the possibility of criminal charges shocking and stunning.The indictment stems from a separate federal investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.Foreign citizens are prohibited by federal law from contributing to U.S. election campaigns. Mr. Chagoury admitted this year to providing approximately $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. He said he had used others, including Toufic Joseph Baaklini, a Washington lobbyist, to mask his donations.Mr. Fortenberry, who has served in Congress for 15 years, was one of those politicians. He is not disputing the fact that the donations, ultimately from Mr. Chagoury, were illegal.“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”Gilbert Chagoury, right, is accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to U.S. political candidates in exchange for access to them.Alexandra Wyman/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Fortenberry is not being accused of helping Mr. Chagoury in his scheme. Rather, prosecutors are looking at whether the congressman lied when they asked him in 2019 whether he was aware that some contributions were illegally made to his campaign in 2016.The government said in court filings that in spring 2018, one of Mr. Fortenberry’s fund-raisers told the congressman that he had funneled $30,000 from Mr. Baaklini to the 2016 re-election event, but that the money “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”The fund-raiser, referred to as Individual H in the indictment, was cooperating with law enforcement when he spoke with Mr. Fortenberry, according to the indictment.Despite the fact that the donations were most likely illegal, Mr. Fortenberry did not take appropriate action, such as filing an amended report with the Federal Election Commission or returning the contributions, the indictment said. It was not until after the Justice Department contacted him in July 2019 that Mr. Fortenberrry returned the contributions, according to the document.In his initial interview with the F.B.I. in 2019, Mr. Fortenberry said that the people who had contributed during his fund-raising event in 2016 were all publicly disclosed, and that he was unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens, according to the indictment.During a subsequent interview at the office of Mr. Fortenberry’s lawyer, the Justice Department alleged that Mr. Fortenberry “falsely stated that he had not been told by Individual H during the 2018 call that Baaklini had given Individual H $30,000 cash” to funnel into his campaign, and that “he was not aware of any illicit donation made” during the fund-raising event.Mr. Fortenberry told investigators that he had ended the 2018 call with the government’s cooperating witness after that person had made a “concerning comment,” even though the indictment alleged that the witness went on to “repeatedly and explicitly” describe illegal contributions and referred to an illegal contribution from a foreign national.“We will fight these charges,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I told them what I knew.”He has known about the possible charges for at least the past few weeks; he used the existence of the investigation in an effort this month to raise money for a legal-defense fund. That campaign was first reported by Axios.Prosecutors said in court documents that Mr. Chagoury was advised to donate to “politicians from less-populous states because the contribution would be more noticeable to the politician and thereby would promote increased donor access.”Mr. Chagoury entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department in 2019. Under that agreement, he admitted to wrongdoing. The department can use those admissions in other matters. He also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation. In return, the U.S. government agreed to drop the charges. The matter was ultimately resolved this year, when Mr. Chagoury paid a $1.8 million fine. More