A Total Nobody

Five years ago today, a group of random internet users exposed what still stands as the biggest breakthrough in the Russiagate hoax: the identification of Igor Danchenko, the Clinton operative who fabricated a litany of lies about Trump-Russia collusion, and whom the FBI had…

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 19, 2025

… painstakingly buried deep inside its darkest files to prevent the truth from ever coming out. That truth was as simple as it was devastating: The entire Russiagate hoax had been fabricated from start to finish, every single part of it.

It all started with a chance meeting between myself and @ClimateAudit in 2018, where we both honed in on one simple idea: if we could somehow figure out who supposedly had access to Putin’s innermost secrets—who was the source for most, if not all, of the accusations against Trump—we could blow the whole thing wide open. We never could have done it on our own, or without the brilliant help of so many internet sleuths who pitched in—none more so than @FOOL_NELSON and @walkafyre and of course “hmmm,” who put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

What we found was even worse than we imagined. We knew the collusion tale was made up, but still assumed the supposed super source would at least be somewhat credible—maybe a former Russian intelligence officer or someone who knew Putin. Instead, what we found in Danchenko was a total nobody who knew nothing about anything, other than how to invent fairytales. To make matters worse, he wasn’t even in Russia. He was living in Washington, D.C., hustling for scraps, including at the Democrat-aligned Brookings Institution, where anti-Trump impeachment witness Fiona Hill served as his mentor.

And with that, on this day five years ago, Russiagate died. The central narrative had collapsed because the person who supposedly had all this information turned out to be a washed-up D.C. fantasist-for-hire. And it wasn’t a Pulitzer-winning journalist or a congressional committee that exposed it. It was a handful of random internet users with day jobs.