#RUSSIAN DOSSIER TRIAL#
The case against the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, ended in a swift acquittal in May.ĭurham’s work has continued deep into the Biden administration Justice Department, but the Danchenko trial seems likely to be the last criminal case his team will bring. The FBI investigated but found no suspicious contact. Last year, Durham’s team charged a Democratic lawyer with making a false statement to the FBI’s top lawyer during a 2016 meeting in which he presented information about a purported digital backchannel between a Russia bank and the Trump organization. It ended in a guilty plea and a sentence of probation – and involved FBI misconduct already uncovered by the Justice Department’s inspector general. 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.
The probe has produced only three criminal cases. 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.īut 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. District Judge Anthony Trenga last month rejected a request from defense lawyers to dismiss the charges, though he called his decision to let the case move forward an “extremely close call.” He has since ruled that prosecutors cannot present evidence about the most salacious parts of the dossier.ĭurham was the U.S. Sears argued that ambiguous statements like that fall short of what’s necessary to convict on a false statements charge. Danchenko’s.”Īnd while Danchenko said he believed Millian was the voice on the anonymous phone call, he never told the FBI with any certainty that it was Millian. “It was a bad question,” said Danchenko’s lawyer, Stuart Sears, at a pretrial hearing last month. 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. They say his answers to the FBI were all technically true.įor instance, an FBI agent asked Danchenko whether he ever “talked” with Dolan about the information that showed up in the dossier. 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.ĭanchenko’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 argue Danchenko knew that Millian wasn’t a source of any anonymous phone call. 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 named Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Specifically, they say he denied that he relied on a Democratic operative, Charles Dolan, a public relations executive who volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s presidential 2016 campaign. Prosecutors say Danchenko lied when the FBI asked him about how he obtained the information he gave to Steele. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu
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