ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal jury acquitted Russian analyst Igor Danchenko on Tuesday on four counts of lying to the FBI in what is expected to be the final case stemming from special counsel John Durham’s three-year probe into the origins of the agency’s investigation into alleged ties between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Prosecutors alleged Danchenko provided false information to the FBI in 2017 when the agency was trying to verify information in a dossier detailing Trump’s alleged ties to Russia that was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The largely unsubstantiated dossier was used by the FBI to support its surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Danchenko, 44, had told the FBI he received some of the information that went into the dossier in an anonymous phone call in July 2016 from someone he thought to be prominent Belorussian-American businessman Sergei Millian — a claim the defense argued was always speculative. Prosecutors used phone records to say the call never happened, while the defense maintained the conversation could have occurred via an encrypted phone app.
The government obtained Millian’s email records, which included messages from Danchenko but no contact information for any apps or references to a purported call between the two men. Millian has denied being a source of information for the dossier.
Durham’s team called several witnesses during the trial, including FBI analyst Brian Auten, who revealed the agency offered up to $1 million to Steele if he could provide evidence or sources that would produce “corroborating information that led to a successful prosecution” stemming from the allegations in his dossier,” and FBI agent Kevin Helson. Helson was Danchenko’s “handler” from 2017 until the Russian analyst’s identity as a main contributor to the dossier was indirectly revealed by the Justice Department in 2020.
Helson recalled Danchenko being upset about “how Mr. Steele embellished the information he provided.”
“Steele was trying to burn everything to the ground around him” to prove the allegations in his dossier true, Helson testified.
Though Danchenko was the one on trial, the government heavily criticized the FBI for its handling of the dossier, in particular, using the report’s uncorroborated allegations as part of its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant application to surveil Page during the 2016 election.
“This case is about protecting the functions and integrity of our institutions,” assistant special counsel Michael Keilty argued during his opening statement, criticizing both Danchenko’s alleged lies and the FBI’s lack of action that he says would have uncovered them. “The bank robber doesn’t get a free pass simply because the security guards were asleep.”Â
At the end of the trial, Keilty told jurors, “this wasn’t the FBI’s finest hour,” but noted the issue before them was solely Danchenko’s “shifting story.”
In his closing argument, defense attorney Stuart Sears homed in on testimony from multiple FBI agents and analysts who testified under oath that they had “no reason to doubt” Danchenko and believed him to be credible.
“It was devastating testimony for the special counsel’s case,” Sears said, noting the internal pressure the agents may have faced before providing that testimony.Â
“The special counsel’s investigation is committed to proving crime at any cost,” regardless of the government’s own evidence proving his client’s innocence, Sears said before going down the list of how emails and comments corroborated — not refuted — Danchenko’s claims.
After the government and the defense rested their cases Friday, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed one of the charges against Danchenko related to whether he had communicated with a Democratic operative named Charles Dolan for some of the information in the so-called Steele dossier. When asked by the FBI whether he had talked to Dolan for the information, Danchenko said he had not. In his decision, Trenga said that answer was literally true, since their communications were made by email.
Prior to the start of the trial, Trenga also ruled prosecutors could not present evidence about the most salacious parts of the dossier, including unproven allegations involving Trump and prostitutes at a Moscow hotel allegedly bugged by Russian intelligence, an allegation that could have raised the possibility that Trump could be blackmailed. Trump had called the dossier fake news and evidence of a political witch hunt against him.
Earlier this year, Durham’s probe lost a court battle when a federal jury found Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty on a charge of lying to the FBI. Prosecutors from Durham’s office had contended that Sussmann misrepresented himself during a meeting with the FBI’s general counsel in 2016 in hope of orchestrating an “October surprise” against rival Trump.
In another case from the probe, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to probation last year, avoiding a prison sentence, for making a false statement by altering an internal FBI email in the course of seeking a court’s permission to continue government surveillance of Page.
Julia Jester