Lawyers for the alleged main source behind the fake Trump-Russia dossier produced by ex-British spy Christopher Steele claim he was never asked to produce documentation of his contacts regarding the dossier by the FBI despite being on the bureau's payroll, a report said.
Igor Danchenko was a paid FBI confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020 before he was charged in November 2021 by special counsel John Durham with lying about conversations he had with Hillary Clinton ally Charles Dolan and businessman Sergei Millian, Washington Examiner Justice Department reporter Jerry Dunleavy noted on Oct. 4.
“Mr. Danchenko was never asked to provide all correspondence with Dolan or Millian and Mr. Danchenko never received a subpoena requesting such correspondence,” Danchenko’s lawyers said in an Oct. 4 court filing. Danchenko's trial begins on Oct. 11. He was charged last year with five counts of making false statements to the FBI.
Durham's indictment states that Danchenko anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Dolan, who spent years, including 2016, doing work in Russia. Danchenko also allegedly lied to the FBI about a phone call he claimed he received from Millian, a Belarus-born U.S. citizen and businessman who Danchenko claimed told him about a debunked conspiracy of cooperation between President Donald Trump and the Russians, which the special counsel said was false.
The Danchenko defense team focused largely on Dolan in the Oct. 4 court filing.
“The Special Counsel should not be permitted to argue that Mr. Danchenko knew the FBI was interested in email communications and omitted such information from his answer,” Danchenko’s lawyers said, adding, “The Special Counsel cannot now pursue a charge it chose not to indict. Doing so would violate Mr. Danchenko’s Fifth Amendment right to be indicted by a grand jury and would result in a fatal variance from the indictment.”
Danchenko’s team argued Monday that “such a theory would be legally unsound because Mr. Danchenko was not under a duty to disclose such information to the FBI.”
The special counsel said that “one has to look at these matters in context” and that in context, it was clear the FBI was asking Danchenko about any and all communications he may have had about the dossier with Dolan, arguing that Danchenko was “keenly” and “fully aware” of “the fact of what the FBI was looking for” as the bureau attempted to figure out if the dossier’s claims were true or false.
Durham pointed out that Danchenko brought a copy of the Democrat-funded dossier to an FBI meeting and said he had reviewed it, showing he knew what the FBI was interested in. The special counsel said the jury, not the judge, should decide whether the evidence shows that “he did know it was untrue.”
The special counsel pointed out in court that Danchenko did not proactively provide the FBI with the email exchange with Dolan that is now at the center of the indictment, but Danchenko’s team argued in court last week and in legal filings on Monday that the FBI simply never asked for all of his communications with Dolan.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is predicting that recent court filings from Durham are “just the beginning” of what’s to come.
Trump reacted to reports that Durham said in a court filing that lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and the Trump White House in an effort to establish a “narrative” linking Trump to Russia.
“It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century,” Trump told Fox News. “This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”
“Who would think a thing like this is even possible?” Trump said. “Durham is also coming up with things far bigger than anybody thought possible—Nobody ever thought a thing like this would be even discussed, let alone an act like this committed.”
Durham revealed that his investigation thus far has found inauthentic “user-generated” data on devices, adding that the CIA said the data that purportedly showed links between Trump and Russian banks “was not technically plausible,” “did not withstand technical scrutiny,” “conflicted with [itself],” and was “user-created and not machine/tool generated.”
“For example,” wrote Durham, “while the FBI did not reach an ultimate conclusion regarding the data’s accuracy or whether it might have been in whole or in part genuine, spoofed, altered, or fabricated, Agency-2 concluded in early 2017 that the Russian Bank-1 data and Russian Phone Provider-1 data was not ‘technically plausible,’ did not ‘withstand technical scrutiny,’ ‘contained gaps,’ ‘conflicted with [itself],’ and was ‘user-created and not machine/tool generated.’ The Special Counsel’s Office has not reached a definitive conclusion in this regard.”
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