A Russian woman whom Igor Danchenko claims provided him with critical anti-Trump dossier allegations has signed a sworn affidavit declaring she never spoke to her childhood friend about any such reports.
The statement under oath from Olga Galkina, a Russian journalist and public relations adviser, casts further doubt about the reliability of Mr. Danchenko, a Russian-born U.S. resident. Ms. Galkina would be subjecting herself to a perjury charge if her court affidavit were untrue.
“I did not provide Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information mentioned in the Dossier,” Ms. Galkina’s affidavit states.
She is the second person to rebut Mr. Danchenko’s claim that they were his source.
Mr. Danchenko is the primary source for the discredited 2016 dossier financed by Democrats, written by British ex-spy Christopher Steele and used by them to try to bring down candidate and later President Donald Trump.
Special counsel John Durham on Nov. 3 brought a five-count indictment against Mr. Danchenko, accusing him of lying to the FBI during a half-dozen interviews in 2017 when agents were trying to validate the Steele dossier.
In the most significant allegation, the indictment states that Mr. Danchenko told agents the dossier claim that there was a “well developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin came from Belarus-born U.S. citizen Sergei Millian.
The indictment says Mr. Danchenko lied and never spoke with Mr. Millian, who has always denied that he was a dossier contributor.
Mr. Danchenko also told the FBI that Ms. Galkina was a key asset. She is identified in heavily redacted FBI interview summaries as “source 3.” The Durham indictment says she was a dossier source, “according to” Mr. Danchenko — suggesting the special counsel’s office has not confirmed that relationship.
The Galkina affidavit was filed in June in a lawsuit brought by lawyers representing Russia’s Alfa Bank, which the dossier accused of paying bribes to Kremlin officials. The owners of Russia’s largest commercial lender have denied the claim.
“I did not provide Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information mentioned in the Dossier and that was connected to [Alfa Bank’s owners],” Ms. Galkina’s affidavit states, as translated from the Russian. “I believe that Mr. Danchenko identified me as Sub-Source 3 to create more authoritativeness for his work.”
Mr. Danchenko’s attorney didn’t respond Tuesday to a query from The Washington Times.
Ms. Galkina said the description of source 3 “largely matches my own personal details — including that Mr. Danchenko and I met when we were teenagers and attended the same school” in Perm, Russia.
She said she met with Mr. Danchenko one time in Washington in 2016.
“Mr. Danchenko and I did not discuss anything related to the dossier or its contents during this meeting,” her affidavit states.
Ms. Galkina also said: “I have never met and do not know Christopher Steele.”
Her affidavit was filed in Alfa Bank’s lawsuit against Fusion GPS, whose co-founders acquired Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaign money to hire Mr. Steele. They and their surrogates then circulated his dossier memos to the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House and news media.
Another aggrieved dossier target is Aleksej Gubarev, a Cyprus-based high-tech entrepreneur whom the dossier accused of actually performing the 2016 hacking and email extraction of Democratic Party computers.
The investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller confirmed the hacking was done by Russian government agents, not Mr. Gubarev.
A federal judge in Florida dismissed Mr. Gubarev’s lawsuit against BuzzFeed, which published the dossier in January 2017. The judge said BuzzFeed had a right to report on the dossier since it was a big part of the FBI’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump colluded with the Kremlin to interfere in the election.
Val Gurvits, Mr. Gubarev’s U.S.-based attorney, said the Galkina affidavit is highly relevant.
“It means Olga was not afraid to confirm under the pains and penalties of perjury that she is not the source, which is a felony if untrue,” Mr. Gurvits told The Washington Times. “I think that if she actually provided any information to Danchenko, she would simply refuse to cooperate with the plaintiffs in this particular lawsuit and she would not have signed any affidavit at all. To me, this is additional proof that the information in the dossier originated with Danchenko and Steele themselves and certainly not with Olga.”
Ms. Galkina worked for Mr. Gubarev as a public relations adviser in 2016 in Cyprus. Mr. Danchenko introduced her to Charles H. Dolan Jr., a Bill and Hillary Clinton-connected public relations executive. She helped him land a PR contract with Mr. Gubarev to act as U.S. spokesman.
The irony is that later that year Mr. Dolan became a source for Mr. Danchenko’s anti-Trump investigation, according to the Durham indictment. The indictment doesn’t link him to the specific claim that Mr. Gubarev conducted the hacking.
Press reports in 2020 said Ms. Galkina was responsible for providing the hacking allegation to Mr. Danchenko, which she denies.
In his FBI interviews, Mr. Danchenko also attributed to “source 3” the dossier claim that Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to pay hush money through operatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Cohen always denied such a trip happened, and the FBI concluded it did not.
• Rowan Scarborough can be reached at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com.
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