John Durham Shows How the FBI Lets Its Informants Mislead It

The use of confidential informants by law enforcement, although a necessary tool, is always fraught with danger. That is why strict oversight is necessary. In the wake of the Abscam cases of the early 1980s, the FBI and Justice Department rigorously re-examined the FBI’s use and management of informants and established new guidelines. The informant program was essentially owned by the field office’s special agent in charge and administered by a special agent informant coordinator in each office. Levels of review, in the field and then at headquarters, were thus put in place. Occasional missteps still happened; but seldom anything on the scale Mr. Durham is uncovering.

As part of his intelligence-focused centralization, FBI Director

Robert Mueller

began the “re-engineering” of human sources. By 2007 all previous classifications of human sources—cooperating witness, criminal informant and others—were subsumed into the category of confidential human source, or CHS. A new Directorate of Intelligence at FBI headquarters would manage the program. That made mistakes and abuses harder to catch.

Had the bureau looked more critically at

Christopher Steele’s

information to begin with, there would have been no investigation of the Trump campaign. Had Mr. Mueller, during his turn as special counsel, examined the source of the allegations, his inquiry would have ended there. According to the grand jury’s indictment of Mr. Danchenko, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team realized early on that he was Mr. Steele’s “primary subsource” for the dossier. Although the dossier has long since been discredited, we now know, from a Sept. 13 filing by Mr. Durham, that the FBI made Mr. Danchenko a CHS in March 2017, paid him, and kept him as a CHS until October 2020. Mr. Danchenko is charged with lying to the FBI during an interview about his providing material for Mr. Steele.

As for Mr. Joffe, he turned data from a White House computer server over to a third party, according to a prosecution filing in the Sussmann trial. Mr. Joffe hasn’t been charged with a crime, and the Journal reported earlier this week that prosecutors have told his lawyer they don’t anticipate doing so.

Still, Mr. Durham is making clear that throughout the Russia-collusion probe and Mueller investigation, the FBI committed misfeasance in its management of informants—let’s call them what they are—and malfeasance in the use of the information they provided.

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché and author of “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy,” forthcoming in December.