The FBI pushed false information before the courts

 Andrew McCarthy:

...

There’s more. Although Danchenko was the most important source for Steele’s explosive allegations against Trump, the FBI did not interview him prior to using Steele’s dossier in its first two sworn surveillance applications, in October 2016 and January 2017. When the bureau finally got around to questioning Danchenko — because it hadn’t been able to corroborate Steele’s claims despite relying on them in court — it learned that Steele appeared to have exaggerated and possibly fabricated rumors and innuendo about Trump that Danchenko was said to have passed along.

Yet, far from alerting the FISC judges that there was significant reason to disbelieve the information from Steele about Trump — who was by then the incumbent president — the FBI continued to rely on that suspect information in sworn surveillance applications in April and June 2017, based on which the FISC granted additional spying warrants.

Durham’s investigation indicates that Danchenko lied to the FBI multiple times, falsehoods that should have been easy for the nation’s flagship federal investigative agency to run down. Yet they kept him on board, kept paying him.

But it gets worse. While the bureau used inane, unverified information from Steele and Danchenko to suggest to a court that the president of the United States might be a Russian asset, the FBI had intelligence indicating that Danchenko himself might actually have been a Russian asset.

That was detailed in yet another Durham court filing last week, in the Virginia federal court where Danchenko is soon scheduled to be tried. The prosecutor related that Danchenko was “the subject of an FBI counterintelligence from 2009 to 2011.”

Why was the investigation closed? Did the FBI end up finding out that Danchenko was not really a Russian asset? Well, no. In fact, reports from its investigation claim that in 2008, when he was working at the Brookings Institution (a center-left Washington think tank), Danchenko offered to pay two of his fellow researchers for classified information if they got jobs in the incoming Obama administration. There is no indication anything came of this, but upon being tipped off, the bureau did some digging and learned that Danchenko had been in contact with people it was investigating as possible Russian intelligence officers.

So what happened? Unbelievably, Durham now explains that the counterintelligence investigation was closed because “the FBI incorrectly believed that [Danchenko] had left the ­country.”
...

Was the FBI corrupt are just incompetent in pushing the Russian hoax against Trump.  I suspect that they were going along with the Democrat plot against Trump despite its lack of merit.  There have been other instances where the FBI has acted like the enforcement wing of the Democrats.  The agency needs a house cleaning.