A Virginia federal jury resumes deliberations Tuesday in the trial of Igor Danchenko. Danchenko is accused of lying to the FBI about the made-up “Steele Dossier,” a fanciful and perverted collection of scraps, baseless allegations, and rumors that Hillary Clinton’s campaign contrived to link Donald Trump to the Kremlin. As has become crystal clear in the Danchenko trial and Durham’s previous trial of Democrat lawyer Michael Sussman, Hillary Clinton was the only one working with Russians with ties to the Kremlin to fund her Russian Collusion propaganda op. Indeed, one wonders if the Steele Dossier itself could have been Russian disinformation. But don’t ask the FBI, because as special counsel John Durham amply pointed out in the Danchenko trial, the premier law enforcement agency in the land was spectacularly incurious about the truthfulness of the guy they paid $200,000 to be a confidential human source — to hide him under the guise of protecting sources and methods.
As with Durham’s previous, unsuccessful prosecution of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussmann, the FBI was incurious in order to keep the fake news about Donald Trump going.
If you want someone to go to jail for this corrosive and explosive Democrat information operation to manipulate an election using the FBI, CIA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and a slavish media, don’t get your hopes up. And even though Durham’s prosecution has shown FBI manipulation of Danchenko, the FBI isn’t technically on trial here. In fact, the charges make them out as the aggrieved party.
Durham’s team put two FBI analysts on the stand who served on the original Crossfire Hurricane investigation and Mueller special counsel probe. Brittany Hertzog, an intelligence analyst, and Supervisory Special Agent Amy Anderson testified that the Mueller team didn’t seem to want to find out more about the sub-sources for the “dossier.” Hertzog testified that she discovered that a source for the dossier was Clinton ally Charles Dolan, a PR exec who met with Danchenko in Moscow and worked with the Russian government. Indeed, she met with another source for the dossier in Cypress, Olga Galkina, who had ties with Putin confidant Dmitry Peskov.
Hertzog told the Durham team on the stand that, “It was an important fact because Mr. Danchenko was identified as being a source for the Steele dossier, and connectivity between Mr. Dolan and Danchenko was important, especially considering Mr. Dolan’s connectivity to Dmitry Peskov.” She considered this connection to be a “national security threat.”
Her FBI supervisors shelved the information and she was told “to not investigate Mr. Dolan” and not to “take further action” about Danchenko’s connection to Hillary Clinton and Kremlin ally Dolan.
It’s almost as if the FBI and Mueller team didn’t want to know, or they knew and thought the story they told was simply too politically helpful to check.
Related: Durham Trial: ‘Salacious and Unverified’ Trump-Russia Dossier Story Too Juicy for FBI to Check
One of the counts against Danchenko was dropped over the legal definition of the word “talked.” Durham’s team claimed Danchenko lied about talking to a source but had tried to reach him via email. Either way, Danchenko lied about ever communicating with him, according to Durham, but pretended he was a sub-source for the dossier. Danchenko had said the “source,” Sergei Millian, told of “a well-developed ‘conspiracy of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.’” Evidence presented at the trial showed that Danchenko never communicated with Millian. Millian was so spooked at being called a source that he fled the United States with his wife and kids.
The four other counts against Danchenko allege he lied to his incurious FBI handler Special Agent Kevin Helson. Helson was destroyed on the stand by Durham, who undertook a detailed analysis of what an investigator is supposed to do, none of which Helson did.
In closing arguments, Durham, who led the prosecution, outlined the four times Danchenko lied to the FBI and argued that those lies were material to how agents handled the case. However, Durham said jurors might realize that the FBI “mishandled the investigation” but that “the government is not here to defend the FBI’s performance in these matters.”
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