Sergei Millian

Millian was reportedly identified as Sources D and E in the Steele dossier and later as "Person 1" in the Inspector General's report.[18][19][20][21][14][22] As an alleged source, Millian was said to have shared key information with a compatriot (later identified as Steele's primary subsource, Russian analyst Igor Danchenko), who then shared it with Christopher Steele. Millian has denied being a source for any material in the dossier,[22][23][24] and he has reportedly refused to cooperate with investigators for the Mueller report.[25] According to Christopher Steele, Danchenko told him he met with Millian in 2016 on three different occasions at restaurants in Washington DC, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina.[26] However, Danchenko told the FBI that he never met Millian, but only spoke on the telephone with someone whom he believed was Millian.[27][28] Danchenko was indicted by John Durham in November 2021 for allegedly having fabricated this telephone conversation with Millian,[27][28] and The Washington Post later corrected and removed large portions of their previous articles that had identified Millian as a key source of the Steele dossier.[5]

In October 2022, judge Anthony Trenga cast doubt on Millian and two 2020 emails he wrote denying he talked to Danchenko: The "emails lack the necessary 'guarantees of trustworthiness' as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts."[29]

Source E (in September 2022, reported to have been Bernd Kuhlen, a German citizen who does not speak Russian[30]) and Source D were reported as the sources behind multiple allegations in the Steele dossier,[7][14][31] including the alleged prostitution ("pee tape") incident at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Moscow.[32][26] According to the founders of Fusion GPS, seven Russian sources told Steele about this incident.[32] According to the dossier, these included Sources D and E and others in Steele's "alphabet list of assets".[33] Media reports in November 2021, however, suggest that the dossier's claims about prostitutes in Moscow did not originate from Millian, but from Charles Dolan Jr., who was "a longtime participant in Democratic Party politics".[34]

Source E was also alleged to have admitted to "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership...managed for Trump by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort",[14] that included "moles in the Democratic Party"[7] and coordinated cyber-attacks such as the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak.[7][33] This was alleged to have the objectives of swinging supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and toward Donald Trump, weakening Clinton and bolstering Trump.[35][36][37][38] In return for this assistance, Source E alleged that the Trump team had agreed to "sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine."[33] Source E was also alleged to have said that the Trump camp became angry and resentful toward Putin when they realized he not only was aiming to weaken Clinton and bolster Trump, but was attempting to "undermine the US government and democratic system more generally".[35][36]

Some of the claims in the dossier allegedly made by Source E became part of the FBI's foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on Carter Page.[36]