A key source for the salacious and discredited Trump-Russia dossier was acquitted by a federal jury Tuesday, in a case that nevertheless produced several bombshells about the FBI’s handling of its probe into the 45th president’s 2016 campaign.

The Virginia panel cleared Igor Danchenko of four counts of lying to the bureau following approximately 10 hours of deliberation across two days after the case judge dropped a fifth count against him last week.

The verdict was the second acquittal at trial in a case brought by special counsel John Durham in connection with the conduct of the FBI counterintelligence probe nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Despite Danchenko’s acquittal, the trial produced a series of revelations about the FBI — including testimony from a bureau analyst that it had offered Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the dossier, $1 million in October 2016 to make its outrageous claims against Trump stick.

Court documents filed by Durham last month also indicated the FBI employed Danchenko as a paid confidential source for more than three-and-a-half years — hiring him even as he was being investigated for his role in compiling the dossier.

In court testimony last week, Danchenko’s FBI handler revealed the Russian national was paid more than $200,000 for his source work — including up to $3,000 for conducting a single meeting. The handler, Kevin Helson, added that he had requested Danchenko receive a $346,000 farewell payment when the bureau dropped him as a source in October 2020. That request was denied.

The trial also revealed that Helson and other agents did no due diligence on Danchenko’s background when a simple check would have revealed suspicions of his role in Steele’s project.

“Don’t feel bad for the FBI agents,” Durham told the jury on Monday during closing arguments. “There are things that they didn’t do that they quite clearly should have done.”

Trump White House veterans lamented the verdict, with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer calling it “unbelievably disappointing.”

“We’ve been waiting and waiting and told to hold our breath, there’s more coming — just be patient, be patient,” Spicer said on his Newsmax show “Spicer & Co.” “This is — I don’t even think disappointing does justice to how bad this is.”

Ric Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, argued in a tweet that the verdict doesn’t exonerate the government officials who pushed falsehoods about alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

“Danchenko and the FBI both lied in and about the Steele dossier,” Grenell wrote. “They made outlandish claims that never materialized. A jury saying that Danchenko didn’t lie doesn’t clear up how the lies were pushed by our government.”

Kash Patel, a former chief of staff to Trump’s last acting defense secretary, tweeted “the two tier system of justice is here to stay,” while Devin Nunes, the former top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and current CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group shared a meme of the jurors as smiling Hillary Clinton clones.

The dossier, which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, purported to document Trump’s tight ties with Moscow and lay out possible ways the Kremlin could blackmail him. It is best known for the claim that the future president paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room where then-President and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama had slept.

Danchenko, by his own admission, was responsible for 80% of the raw intelligence in the dossier — which was commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — and half of the accompanying analysis.

The information in the file was later used by federal investigators as evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant targeting Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In Durham’s lone investigative success, a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to falsifying documents in order to get the warrant renewed.

The dossier was later publicly disavowed at the highest levels of the FBI, with the bureau’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, telling lawmakers in November 2020 he would not have approved the Page warrant application had he known the information in the file was inaccurate.

The case against Danchenko turned on a phone call he claimed to receive from someone he believed was Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman, who was purportedly in touch with people connected to Trump and told Danchenko about a false conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Prosecutors said phone records showed no evidence of a call between Danchenko and Millian and that Danchenko had no reason to believe Millian, a Trump supporter he’d never met, was suddenly going to be willing to provide disparaging information about Trump to a stranger.

Danchenko’s lawyers maintained that their client never said he talked with Millian, but only guessed that he might have been the caller when the FBI asked him to speculate.

The defense also said it was irrelevant that Danchenko’s phone records don’t show a call because Danchenko told the FBI from the start that the call — which took place days after Danchenko reached out to Millian over email after a mutual acquaintance brokered a connection — might have taken place over a secure mobile app for which he had no records.

Durham had also charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about speaking with Democratic operative and Clinton ally Charles Dolan Jr. about claims related to 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort but Judge Anthony Trenga dropped that charge last week.

During the trial, Dolan admitted that he lied to Danchenko and made up a source for a claim that ended up in the Steele dossier. Dolan Jr. said that he told Danchenko he heard rumors about Manafort’s dismissal by the Trump campaign from a “GOP friend” over drinks, but in reality he was merely parroting what he gleaned from watching cable news. 

With Post wires