Igor Danchenko leaves the federal courthouse in
Alexandria, Va., on Nov. 4, 2021. On Tuesday, a jury acquitted the think
tank analyst of charges that he lied to the FBI about his role in the
creation of a discredited dossier about former President Donald Trump.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A jury on Tuesday acquitted on all counts a think tank analyst accused of lying to the FBI about his role in the creation of a discredited dossier about former President Donald Trump.
The case against Igor Danchenko was the third and possibly final case brought by Special Counsel John Durham
as part of his probe into how the FBI conducted its own investigation
into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the
Kremlin.
The first two cases ended in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.
Danchenko betrayed no emotion as the verdict was read. His wife
wiped away tears after the fourth and final "not guilty" was read by the
clerk.
The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham, who declined to comment after the hearing, as did several jurors.
Despite
hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping
conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy,
and then his presidency, the investigation over the course of more than
three years failed to produce evidence that met those expectations.
✓✓ The
sole conviction — an FBI agent admitted altering an email
related to the surveillance of a former Trump aide — was for conduct
uncovered not by Durham but by the Justice Department's inspector
general, and the two cases that Durham took to trials ended in
across-the-board acquittals.
The Danchenko case was the first of the three to delve deeply into the origins of the "Steele dossier," a compendium of allegations that Trump's 2016 presidential campaign was colluding with the Kremlin.
Most
famously, it alleged that the Russians could have blackmail material on
Trump for his supposed interactions with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
Trump derided the dossier as fake news and a political witch hunt when
it became public in 2017.
Danchenko, by his own admission, was responsible for 80% of the
raw intelligence in the dossier and half of the accompanying analysis,
though trial testimony indicated that Danchenko was shocked and dismayed
about how Steele presented the material and portrayed it as factual
when Danchenko considered it more to be rumor and speculation.
,✓ Prosecutors
said that if Danchenko had been more honest about his sources, the FBI
might not have treated the dossier so credulously. As it turned out, the
FBI used material from the dossier to support applications for
warrantless surveillance of a Trump campaign official, Carter Page, even
though the FBI never was able to corroborate a single allegation in the
dossier.
Prosecutors said Danchenko lied about the identity of
his own sources for the material he gave to Steele. The specific
charges against Danchenko allege that he essentially fabricated one of
his sources when the FBI interviewed him to determine how he derived the
material he provided for the dossier.
Danchenko told the FBI that some of the material came when he
received an anonymous call from a man he believed to be Sergei Millian, a
former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Prosecutors
said Danchenko's story made no sense. They said that phone records show
no evidence of a call, 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, as a starting point, maintain that Danchenko
never said he talked with Millian. He only guessed that Millian might
have been the caller when the FBI asked him to speculate. And they said
he shouldn't be convicted of a crime for making a guess at the FBI's
invitation.
That said, Danchenko's lawyers say, he had good
reason to believe the caller may well have been Millian. The call came
just a few days after Danchenko had reached out to Millian over email
after a mutual acquaintance brokered a connection over email.
✓ And
Danchenko's lawyers say it's irrelevant that his phone records don't
show a call because Danchenko told the FBI from the start that the call
might have taken place over a secure mobile app for which he had no
records.
The jury began deliberations Monday afternoon after
hearing closing arguments on four counts. On Friday, U.S. District Judge
Anthony Trenga threw out a fifth count, saying prosecutors had failed
to prove it as a matter of law."
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