Did Danchenko Lie To The FBI? As Jury Decides His Fate, Here’s What You Need To Know
By: Margot Cleveland
October 17, 2022
It will soon be up to the jury to decide Danchenko’s fate — and Durham’s as well.
A Virginia jury will begin deliberations Monday in the criminal case Special Counsel John Durham brought against Steele dossier primary sub-source Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying to the FBI. Here’s what you need to know about the charges, the law, and the evidence presented during last week’s trial to understand the case and the eventual jury verdict.
The Charges
In November of 2021, the special counsel’s office charged Danchenko in a five-count indictment with lying to the FBI related to his role as Christopher Steele’s “primary sub-source” for “the notorious dossier that enabled Obama administration surveillance of the Trump campaign.”
The first count of the indictment alleged that Danchenko lied when, on June 15, 2017, he responded “no,” to this question from his handler, identified during the trial as Special Agent Helson: “You had never talked to Chuck Dolan about anything that showed up in the dossier, right?”
Dolan, a longtime Democrat operative and Clinton crony, had worked with Danchenko in mid-2016 through the fall, with Danchenko assisting Dolan in organizing a conference in Moscow. Danchenko had also introduced one of his friends who was looking for a public relations firm to Dolan. Amid these interactions, Danchenko emailed Dolan, asking Dolan for any inside information about Paul Manafort’s removal from the Trump campaign.
In response to Danchenko’s email, Dolan claimed he “had lunch with a GOP friend who knows the players” and learned that Trump’s former primary campaign manager Corey Lewandowski hated Manafort. During the trial, Dolan admitted he invented the GOP friend and instead concocted the supposed insider information. Nonetheless, a nearly identical claim appeared in the Steele dossier.
While the trial evidence established that Danchenko had communicated with Dolan via email concerning Paul Manafort’s removal from the Trump campaign — details later summarized in the Steele dossier — on Friday, presiding federal Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed the related false statement charge contained in Count I of the indictment.
Judge Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, held that the special counsel could not prevail on its false statement charge against Danchenko because the evidence presented at trial failed to show Danchenko had ever “talked” with Dolan about Manafort. Here, the court stressed that “talked” literally means “to deliver or express in speech, to express, communicate, or exchange ideas or thoughts by means of spoken words, to convey or exchange ideas, thoughts, information, and so on, by means of speech.”
“Applying that definition, the evidence in this case establishes that Mr. Danchenko’s answer was literally true,” because “the government failed to introduce any evidence that Mr. Danchenko verbally communicated with Dolan about the Manafort allegations that ended up in the Steele dossier,” the court held. Trenga further noted that the government had failed to present any evidence “that would allow the jury to find that Mr. Danchenko understood the word ‘talk’ more broadly than its standard meaning.” Consequently, as a matter of law, the government could not prevail on the false statements charge related to Dolan as alleged in Count I of the indictment, and Trenga dismissed that count.
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https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/17/did-danchenko-lie-to-the-fbi-as-jury-decides-his-fate-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
