Analyst acquitted at trial over discredited Trump dossier
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Analyst acquitted at trial over discredited Trump dossier
The case against Igor Danchenko was the third and possibly final case brought by Special Counsel John Durham as part of his probe into how the FBI conducted its own investigation into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The first two cases ended in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.
Danchenko betrayed no emotion as the verdict was read. His wife wiped away tears after the clerk read the final “not guilty" to the four counts he faced.
Danchenko didn't comment after the hearing, but his lawyer, Stuart Sears, spoke briefly to reporters, saying, “We’ve known all along that Mr. Danchenko is innocent. We’re happy now that the American public knows that as well.”
The jury reached its verdict after roughly nine hours of deliberations over two days. One juror, Joel Greene of Vienna, Virginia, said there were no real disputes among the jury and that jurors just wanted to be thorough in reviewing the four counts.
The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham. Despite hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, the three-year investigation failed to produce evidence that met those expectations. The sole conviction — an FBI lawyer admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of a former Trump aide — was for conduct uncovered not by Durham but by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the two cases that Durham took to trials ended in full acquittals.
Durham declined comment after the hearing, but he said in a statement issued through the Justice Department: "While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”
He issued an identical statement after the first trial ended in acquittal.
The Danchenko case was the first of the three to delve deeply into the origins of the “Steele dossier,” a compendium of allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was colluding with the Kremlin.
Most famously, it alleged that the Russians could have blackmail material on Trump for his supposed interactions with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Trump derided the dossier as fake news and a political witch hunt when it became public in 2017.
Danchenko, by his own admission, was responsible for 80% of the raw intelligence in the dossier and half of the accompanying analysis, though trial testimony indicated that Danchenko was shocked and dismayed about how Steele presented the material and portrayed it as factual when Danchenko considered it more to be rumor and speculation.
Prosecutors said that if Danchenko had been more honest about his sources, the FBI might not have treated the dossier so credulously. As it turned out, the FBI used material from the dossier to support applications for warrantless surveillance of a Trump campaign official, Carter Page, even though the FBI never was able to corroborate a single allegation in the dossier.
Prosecutors said Danchenko lied about the identity of his own sources for the material he gave to Steele. The specific charges against Danchenko allege that he essentially fabricated one of his sources when the FBI interviewed him to determine how he derived the material he provided for the dossier.
Danchenko told the FBI that some of the material came when he received an anonymous call from a man he believed to be Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Prosecutors said Danchenko’s story made no sense. They said that phone records show no evidence of a call, and that Danchenko had no reason to believe Millian, a Trump supporter he’d never met, was suddenly going to be willing to provide disparaging information about Trump to a stranger.
Danchenko’s lawyers, as a starting point, maintain that Danchenko never said he talked with Millian. He only guessed that Millian might have been the caller when the FBI asked him to speculate. And they said he shouldn’t be convicted of a crime for making a guess at the FBI’s invitation.
That said, Danchenko’s lawyers say, he had good reason to believe the caller may well have been Millian. The call came just a few days after Danchenko had reached out to Millian over email after a mutual acquaintance brokered a connection over email.
And Danchenko’s lawyers say it’s irrelevant that his phone records don’t show a call because Danchenko told the FBI from the start that the call might have taken place over a secure mobile app for which he had no records.
The jury began deliberations Monday afternoon after hearing closing arguments on four counts. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga threw out a fifth count , saying prosecutors had failed to prove it as a matter of law.
Trenga nearly threw out all of the charges before the trial began, citing the legal strength of Danchenko's defense, but allowed the case to proceed in what he described as “an extremely close call.”
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
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The jury reached its verdict after roughly nine hours of deliberations over two days. One juror, Joel Greene of Vienna, Virginia, said there were no real disputes among the jury and that jurors just wanted to be thorough in reviewing the four counts.
The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham. Despite hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, the three-year investigation failed to produce evidence that met those expectations. The sole conviction — an FBI lawyer admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of a former Trump aide — was for conduct uncovered not by Durham but by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the two cases that Durham took to trials ended in full acquittals.
Durham declined comment after the hearing, but he said in a statement issued through the Justice Department: "While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”
He issued an identical statement after the first trial ended in acquittal.
Now we wait to see how certain apologists spin this news, and who changes their user photos.
Of course - you have their biggest apologist - Turd Hannity - spinning
federal prosecutors have an 88% success rate in court and that buffoon just failed twice in a row. loser.
I've found that if you must watch him, the best way to do it is while spinning your TV in a counter-clockwise direction. This helps compensate with all the spinning Hannity does. A good shot of Dramamine helps too....
Don't worry, the fact that Durham failed miserably will be ignored by rightwing conservatives just like they ignored all those Trump campaign staffers, campaign manager and assorted underlings who were caught, prosecuted and convicted for actually lying to the FBI and a host of other criminal acts.
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted in 2018 on federal bank and tax fraud charges, pleaded guilty to more federal conspiracy charges, and was sentenced to seven and a half years in federal prison.
Former campaign chief Steve Bannon was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in connection with a scheme to defraud donors to fund a wall at the US southern border.
Informal Trump adviser and "fixer" Roger Stone was convicted on seven counts on obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering in connection to the Mueller probe and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates, a key aide to Manafort, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and false statements and received only a 45-day sentence thanks to his extensive cooperation with investigators in the Mueller probe.
Trump's short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI in connection. Flynn, who went on to push conspiracy theories about non-existent fraud in the 2020 election, received a full pardon from Trump in November 2020.
Longtime Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to tax fraud, bank fraud, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress in 2018, and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in connection to the Mueller probe and served 14 days in federal prison.
Trump Inaugural Committee chairman Tom Barrack was charged with federal crimes including unlawful lobbying, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to investigators in July 2021.
And the only reason many of those criminals are out of jail at the moment is because the slime boss they lied for pardoned them for their crimes as repayment for their loyalty. Total disgusting criminal scum bags just like their boss, yet those who love to wallow in the rightwing conservative swamp of slime had all their hopes pinned on Durham finding something, ANYTHING, to prove they're not the criminals and it's really their opponents who are the bad guys. They even invented a shadow 'deep state' to explain away why only Republican operatives and Trump underlings were getting caught and prosecuted. Their tiny, deluded minds simply couldn't accept that they were caught and prosecuted because the people these deluded morons have been supporting ARE fucking criminals.
It's all a deep state conspiracy I tell ya!
We're still awaiting those indictments on the entire Obama administration.
Hillary Clinton retired in January of 2013 and yet El Trumpo blamed her for FBI and CIA investigations into Trump's Russian dealings in 2015 and 2016...
He doesn't have the brain power to come up with anything new.
Hannity Spins Durham Probe Acquittal: ‘I Never Really Cared That Much’
William Vaillancourt, Tue, October 18, 2022 at 11:58 PM
Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday tried to extract some good news from the acquittal of Igor Danchenko in what was Special Counsel John Durham’s final case, in part by minimizing his own past focus on the Steele dossier researcher.
“A lot of people think this was a loss for Durham,” Hannity said after a judge found Danchenko not guilty on four counts of lying to the FBI. The work by Durham, the Trump-era prosecutor tasked with probing the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, resulted in zero convictions. In May, Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted of lying to the FBI.
“I never really cared that much about Igor Danchenko,” Hannity claimed. “What we learned in the trial is what matters to me more.”
On Tuesday, the Fox host insisted that there were still unanswered questions.
“Will we ever get to the bottom of any of this?” he asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) as a chyron labeled Danchenko a “deep state bad actor.” “Are all of these people that signed those FISA warrants filled with information that they know was not verified—are they ever going to be held accountable, or do we have the two tiered justice system in perpetuity?”
Johnson responded with the wild claim that Danchenko and Sussman were acquitted “because the jury found the FBI was the more corrupt actor in what they did.”
“We need to get to the bottom of this,” demanded Johnson, who alleged during a Senate debate against Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes last week that the FBI set him up in a 2020 meeting.
The FBI was the victim in all of Durham's charges. He never charged the FBI with any wrongdoing...
If/When the Republicans take the House it will be one committee circus after another. For any of you that thought the whole Jan 6th committee was a joke it will pale in comparison to the next two years. It would be laughable if it weren't so, so, so hypocritical. Instead it's just sad.
Not exactly the same thing but related - Fox News Nation , which I believe is a streaming channel, is now conducting an on the air "mock trial" of Hunter Biden , with the old reality tv judge Joe Brown presiding.
Not surprising. The MAGA Brigade will twist anything Hunter Biden did to make Joe look bad. If they continue pressure for the whole 2 years they may be in the House, it could backfire on them and make Dems look like a more logical choice in 2024 for Independents. If they score any actual factual points it would take Biden out of that 2024 equation and that won't help Republicans either.
Make no mistakes, barring a criminal conviction Trump will run again in 2024. Look for Large Marge Green to be a contention for VP.