Main source of Steele dossier Igor Danchenko acquitted of lying to FBI

Igor Danchenko, the Russian analyst considered the primary source of the “Steele dossier,” a 2016 opposition research report filled with unproven, compromising personal and financial information about then-candidate Donald Trump, walked out of federal court on Tuesday after prosecutors jurors acquitted him of all charges of lying to the FBI.

Danchenko’s case stems from Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe. In 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr assigned Durham to review the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Russia’s connection to the 2016 Trump campaign.

A jury in Alexandria, Virginia, acquitted Danchenko on all four counts after about 11 hours of deliberations over two days. Danchenko appeared emotional after the verdict was read.

“We knew all along that Mr. Danchenko was innocent. We’re happy that the American public now knows that, too,” defense attorney Stuart Sears told cameras outside the courthouse.

In a statement, Durham expressed his disappointment with the outcome but said he respected the jury’s decision.

The charges in the case relate to statements made by Danchenko regarding his 2016 communications with Sergei Milian, who was then president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Prosecutors say Danchenko fabricated an anonymous call from someone he believed to be Milian who tipped him off about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. That information then appeared in the pages of Steele’s dossier and was used in the FISA warrant application and subsequent renewals filed by the FBI to justify surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

During closing arguments, prosecutors argued that if the FBI had discovered during the 2017 interviews that Danchenko had not been telling the truth about the source of the information, then it would have been forced to inform the FISA court that the bureau’s previous filings did not are reliable, and would not use the information in subsequent FISA applications.

“The government is not here to defend the FBI’s actions in these matters,” Durham said during his closing argument.

Durham said there are things the FBI should have done differently, but that’s not the issue for the jury to consider. The issue, he said, was Danchenko’s false statements.

But Danchenko’s lawyer, Stuart Sears, said his client told the FBI that the information he gave to Christopher Steele, the former British spy and author of the salacious dossier, was mostly hearsay and speculation that probably couldn’t be verified. They claim that Danchenko first read Steele’s dossier when it appeared on Buzzfeed in January 2017, and before that he had no idea how Steele would use the information he gave him.

“For them to throw out the FISA warrant against Mr. Danchenko is outrageous,” Sears told the jury.

Sears also indicated that Danchenko served as a paid confidential human source for the FBI from 2017 until 2020, when his identity became public. Attorney General Barr ordered the release of redacted notes from Danchenko’s January 2017 interviews, and Internet sleuths were able to identify him. During the trial, FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson testified that information provided by Danchenko to the FBI was used in more than two dozen investigations before he was exposed.

“He deserved more than to be exposed because politicians thought politics was more important than national security,” Sears said.

Durham rejected this argument.

“If they were false when he gave them, even if he did good things afterward, they’re still false statements,” Durham said.

Both sides discussed the political nature of this case. The defense said the “political winds” changed when Barr appointed Durham to investigate the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe and Danchenko’s identity as the primary source of the dossier was revealed.

“The government started with a presumption of guilt,” Sears said.

Durham, in his closing remarks to jurors, asked them to consider how this investigation came about and referred them to a special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Durham said he found no “collusion or conspiracy.”

Earlier in the trial, Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed a fifth count related to the allegation that Danchenko lied about his communications with Democratic Party operative and PR executive Charles Dolan about information that ended up in the dossier.

The FBI asked Danchenko if he had talked to Dolan about anything specific included in the Steele file. He said he wasn’t, but prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to argue that an email between the two constituted a conversation. Judge Trenga dismissed the charge because the email communication did not meet the dictionary definition of “conversation”.

This trial was the third prosecution for the Durham team and the second time it went to trial. In May, a jury found Democratic attorney Michael Sussman not guilty of lying to the FBI. In 2020, former FBI attorney Kevin Kleinsmith pleaded guilty to tampering with an email used as part of the FISA application to monitor Page. Kleinsmith was sentenced to one year of probation.

Durham’s team is still expected to produce a report on its findings about the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation.