CTH begins every review of John Durham news with the following disclaimer: If Special Counsel John Durham was going to reveal what is possible; how is Durham going to handle the reality that Robert Mueller’s and Andrew Weissmann’s entire existence was in place to hide it?
♦ The primary subsource for the Christopher Steele dossier was a guy named Igor Danchenko. According to several investigations of the dossier, Chris Steele attributes most of the information within the dossier to Danchenko. John Durham has arrested Igor Danchenko [indictment pdf here]
The backstory is…. In essence, Chris Steele put a bunch of Danchenko garbage inside his dossier, and his dossier was used to get the Carter Page FISA warrant to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign (October 21, 2016). Danchenko then disavowed the veracity of all the information he provided during FBI interviews in January, February and March 2017; but the FBI ignored the Danchenko statements and used the dossier for two more FISA renewals in April and June 2017.
For a background on Igor Danchenko and his sketchy claims both to Chris Steele and to FBI investigators, review this prior video put together by John Spiropoulos prior to the information we discover today:
Yesterday, Igor Danchenko was indicted on five counts of lying to the FBI as an outcome of the special counsel investigation headed by John Durham. {New York Times}
However, it is important to note what Durham is doing here. Durham is charging Danchenko (working outside government) with lying to the FBI while simultaneously avoiding drawing attention to the FBI/DOJ officials (inside government) who knew Danchenko was lying and were willfully blind to the lying in order to continue attacking and investigating President Donald Trump.
So far, John Durham is willing to go after the co-conspirators outside government, but he is unwilling to target or call out the co-conspirators currently inside the U.S. government.
Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.
The indictment [pdf here] says that Igor Danchenko falsely told investigators that he received a phone call in July 2016 from Sergei Millian, an individual he believed to be a U.S. citizen and the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Danchenko previously said Millian provided him with information for the dossier, and the two later agreed to meet in person in New York. However, Millian has said that phone call with Danchenko never took place, there was no conversation or sharing of information and they never met. The indictment affirms what Millian has claimed from the outset.
Danchenko falsely accused Millian of giving him information for the dossier because Danchenko was making it all up. Instead the information was really coming from Charles Dolan Jr, a Democrat campaign official who the indictment calls “PR Executive-1” (h/t Aaron Mate).
Within the indictment, John Durham asserts that Danchenko and Dolan were working together to manufacture false information about Donald Trump in order to funnel it into the dossier through Christopher Steele. The FBI would then gain the fabricated dirt from Chris Steele for their Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Charles Dolan (DNC campaign operative) later admitted to the FBI that the information he provided to Danchenko was bogus. However, Danchenko denied getting the information from Dolan, a lie that now becomes part of the indictment.
Technofog has a good review of the indictment – SEE HERE – which includes:
Overall, Danchenko faces five false statement charges:
- Falsely denying he didn’t talk to the Democrat PR executive (Dolan) about the dossier allegations.
- Falsely stating he took a 2016 call from Russian Sergei Millian (whom he says alleged a Trump/Russia conspiracy).
- Falsely stating in another FBI interview that he took the 2016 call from Millian.
- Falsely stating he talked to Millian more than once over the phone.
- False in another FBI interview about his conversations with Millian.