The Russian émigré who acquainted the world with the salacious rumor of Donald Trump's unverified encounter with full-bladdered sex workers says Americans missed a darker figure lurking behind the former president.
Igor Danchenko, the primary source behind the notorious Steele Dossier, remains deeply concerned about the significance of Trump's "pee tape" story and what it means for his potential reelection, Rolling Stone reported Monday.
"It sounds like this stupid college prank," he said. "But it also symbolized to me — at the time, certainly — this sort of strange, perverted closeness that Trump, before he became a candidate, established with certain important politically-exposed individuals in Russia.”
Danchenko gave an in-depth interview to Rolling Stone on the explosive dossier about Trump's alleged ties to Russia and the reactions from Americans he found baffling.
Buzzfeed first published the 35-page Steel Dossier in 2017, just 10 days before Trump would take office. Many of the unverified rumors were collected by Danchenko during about a half-dozen trips to Russia in 2016, he told Rolling Stone.
Danchenko, who worked for a business intelligence firm at the time, didn’t know his work was financed by the Democratic National Committee, nor did he predict Attorney General Bill Barr would declassify reports from his subsequent FBI interviews and effectively out him as a government informant, Rolling Stone reports.
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“I’m chained to this dossier, to Trump,” Danchenko said. “And I can’t unlink myself from it.”
The most memorable rumor outlined in the dossier takes place two years after former President Barack Obama humiliated Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and motivated him to run for president.
The rumor goes that Trump, staying in a Russian Ritz-Carlton for a Miss Universe pageant, hosted oligarchs and sex workers in his presidential suite.
"According to Danchenko, several sources in Russia — sources he still won’t reveal — told him rumors about what Trump did next," Rolling Stone reports. "He instructed the sex workers to pee on the bed."
Trump denied the rumor in a press conference by pointing to his understanding of Russian surveillance and his fear of germs. No evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate the claim.
But Danchenko's boss Christopher Steele added this rumor to an eponymous dossier and sent it to David Kramer, an aide of Sen. John McCain, who leaked it to Buzzfeed without the informant's knowledge, according to Rolling Stone.
The Russian émigré was outraged that the document was published "unsanitized" because his personal goal had not been to provide the news cycle scandals, but to better inform the American public about its ascendent leader, Rolling Stone reports.
“There’s a serious national-security issue here, a serious investigation," he said. "[But] it’s just, ‘Who is going to publish the bigger scoop with the most likes and retweets?'"
Danchenko regrets the inclusion of the pee tape rumor, which Rolling Stone posits "hijacked the dialogue of serious allegations about Russian influence with huge geopolitical importance."
Americans, distracted by the salacious scandals Danchenko still believes were correct, forgot about one important person: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"I still think there’s some leverage they hold against Trump," he said. "You want to call it pee tape? Call it pee tape.”
