by Byron Tau and Alan Cullison at Wall Street Journal
An indictment returned in federal court on Thursday casts doubt on the sources of a series of salacious and largely discredited reports about former President Donald Trump and Russia that the FBI ultimately used in support of a counterintelligence investigation into his 2016 campaign and associates.
A Russia analyst who served as a central source for a dossier of opposition research material about Mr. Trump compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI on Thursday, according to an indictment unsealed in Virginia federal court. He appeared before a judge on Thursday and was released on bond.
Russian-born Igor Danchenko was charged with five counts of making false statements to officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the sources of the information he helped compile for Mr. Steele. As part of a counterintelligence probe into whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates had links to Russia, Mr. Danchenko sat for numerous interviews with FBI officials in 2017 as they tried to corroborate allegations made in the dossier.
The 39-page indictment also states that several key pieces of information in the dossier—purportedly a private intelligence product compiled by a retired British MI6 agent with deep ties to Eastern Europe—weren’t collected from Russia but were sourced to chatter and gossip circulating in American political circles.
The charges against Mr. Danchenko stem from…