Source of Steele report faces trial on charge of lying to FBI
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Five years after the term “Steele dossier” entered the political lexicon, a think tank analyst who contributed to research about Donald Trump and Russia goes on trial Tuesday for lying to the FBI about his sources of information.
Igor Danchenko is the third person to be prosecuted by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed to investigate the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane” — the designation given to the FBI’S 2016 probe into former president Trump’s Russia connections. It is also the first of Durham’s cases that delves deeply into the origins of the dossier that Trump derided as fake news and a political witch hunt.
Danchenko, a Russian analyst, was a source of information for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to research ties between Russia and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The compilation of files, which included salacious rumors, came to be known as the “Steele dossier.”
Though the dossier did not help launch the FBI’S investigation into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, the Justice Department did rely on it when it applied for and received warrants to monitor the communications of a former Trump campaign adviser.
As part of its efforts to verify information in the dossier, the FBI interviewed Danchenko in 2017. He is charged with lying to agents about his information sources, with prosecutors accusing Danchenko of misleading the FBI in an effort to make his own contributions seem more credible.
Prosecutors say Danchenko lied when the FBI asked him about how he obtained the information he gave to Steele. Specifically, they say he denied that he relied on a Democratic operative, Charles Dolan, a public relations executive who volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Prosecutors also say Danchenko lied when he said he received information from an anonymous phone call that he believed was placed by a man named Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-american Chamber of Commerce. They argue Danchenko knew that Millian wasn’t a source of any anonymous phone call.
The indictment says the FBI could have better judged the veracity of the Steele dossier had it known that a Democratic operative was the source of much of its information.
Danchenko’s lawyers say the prosecution “is a case of extraordinary government overreach.”
They note that Danchenko agreed to multiple voluntary FBI interviews throughout 2017. They say his answers to the FBI were all technically true.
For instance, an FBI agent asked Danchenko whether he ever “talked” with Dolan about the information that showed up in the dossier. While prosecutors have produced evidence that the two had email exchanges about topics in the dossier, there’s no evidence that they talked orally about those topics.
“It was a bad question,” said Danchenko’s lawyer, Stuart Sears, at a pretrial hearing last month.
And while Danchenko said he believed Millian was the voice on the call, he never told the FBI with any certainty that it was Millian. Sears argued that statements like that fall short of what’s necessary to convict on a false statements charge.
Durham was the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut in 2019 when he was tapped by then-attorney General William Barr to hunt for potential misconduct by government officials who conducted the original Russia investigation.
But after more than three years, Durham’s work has failed to meet the expectations of Trump supporters who hoped he would uncover sweeping FBI conspiracies to derail the Republican’s candidacy.
The probe has produced three criminal cases.
The first case was against an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who was accused of altering an email related to the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. It ended in a guilty plea and a sentence of probation.
Last year, Durham’s team charged Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI’S top lawyer during a 2016 meeting in which he presented information about a purported — and debunked — backchannel between a Russia bank and the Trump organization. The case against Sussmann ended in an acquittal in May.