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Tag Archives: dossier
Witness contradicts theory against Trump dossier analyst
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — The FBI agent who questioned a think tank analyst charged with lying to the bureau about his role in the creation of a flawed dossier about former President Donald Trump has twice testified that he believes the analyst was truthful with him, jurors heard Wednesday.
FBI analyst Brian Auten testified for a second straight day at U.S. District Court in Alexandria at the trial of Igor Danchenko. The Russian-born analyst, who now lives in Virginia, faces a five-count indictment alleging he made false statements to the FBI about his sources of information he provided about Trump to British spy Christopher Steele.
Prosecutors allege that Danchenko fabricated one of his sources and obscured another when he was interviewed by the FBI about his role in the “Steele dossier.” That dossier, commissioned by Democrats in 2016, raised allegations of connections between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
During Wednesday’s cross-examination, though, Auten acknowledged that he has had positive things to say about Danchenko in past testimony to a Senate committee and to the Office of the Inspector General, both of which conducted their own investigations about the FBI probe into links between Trump and Russia.
The jury heard a partial transcript of testimony Auten gave to a Senate committee in October 2020, in which Auten said Danchenko “was being truthful about who his sub-sources were. I don’t think he was fabricating sub-sources.”
Auten told the jury he stands by the testimony he gave to the Senate.
The testimony was significant for the defense, which says special counsel John Durham has charged Danchenko with a crime when other government agencies found Danchenko to be credible. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who launched his own probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, never saw fit to charge Danchenko.
And the FBI, after three days of voluntary interviews Danchenko gave in January 2017, decided he was trustworthy enough to make him a paid “confidential human source” who would provide information to the bureau.
Durham was appointed by special counsel by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate any misconduct in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and its alleged ties to Russia. Danchenko is the third person to be prosecuted by Durham. It is the first of Durham’s cases that delves deeply into the origins of the dossier, which Trump derided as fake news and a political witch hunt.
Durham’s other two cases resulted in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.
In the Danchenko trial, prosecutors say he lied when he told the FBI he obtained some of his information in an anonymous phone call from a man he believed to be Sergei Millian, a former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Prosecutors say that Danchenko never spoke with Millian and that phone records show he never received an anonymous phone call at the time Danchenko claimed it occurred.
Prosecutors also say Danchenko lied when he told the FBI he never “talked” with a man named Charles Dolan about the allegations contained in the dossier.
Defense lawyers say that Danchenko did receive a call, perhaps over an internet app, from someone he genuinely believed to be Millian, and that he was truthful when he said he never “talked” with Dolan about the information in the dossier because their relevant exchanges were over email.
Steele dossier source heads to trial, in likely last stand for Durham
Igor Danchenko — a researcher who fed information to former British spy Christopher Steele, and whose contributions ended up in the now-infamous “Steele dossier” of allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016 — goes on trial Tuesday. The trial is expected to last one week.
Danchenko was indicted on charges of lying to FBI agents who interviewed him in 2017 about the sources behind his claims to Steele. Defense attorneys argue that Danchenko made a series of “equivocal” statements to the FBI and should not be penalized for giving wishy-washy answers to vaguely worded questions.
Whatever the outcome, the Danchenko trial is shaping up to be Durham’s last stand in court.
A grand jury Durham had been using in Alexandria is now inactive, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the pending legal proceedings. It is not clear whether Durham is still using a grand jury in D.C.
Durham was tasked with writing a report summarizing his investigation, as former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did at the close of his earlier probe into Trump and Russia. But it would be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland how much, if any, of Durham’s report to make public.
“The public is waiting ‘with bated breath’ for the Durham Report, which should reveal corruption at a level never seen before in our country,” Trump wrote in August on his social media platform, Truth Social, after FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago complex.
Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as the U.S. attorney in Connecticut in the Trump administration, was asked by then-Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to dig into the origins of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into possible coordination between Trump and Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. A report by the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 criticized the FBI for failing to note doubts about the veracity of the information it used to seek court approval of secret surveillance on a former Trump campaign adviser, though the inspector general said he found no evidence of political bias in the agency’s decision-making. Barr, a Trump appointee, had complained that the 2016 probe was initiated on the “thinnest” of evidence.
Barr later appointed Durham as a special counsel and directed him to write a final report “in a form that will permit public dissemination.”
The special counsel trained his sights in large part on the FBI’s use of reports Steele produced, which are now commonly referred to as the “Steele dossier.” Steele had been hired to produce the reports by research firm Fusion GPS, which had been retained by a law firm that represented Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS initially had been hired to dig into Trump’s background by a website funded by a deep-pocketed GOP donor.
Years after they began digging, Durham and his team have found only mixed success. The Danchenko case marks the second time that the prosecutor who was supposed to root out dishonesty and misconduct within the ranks of the FBI and intelligence agencies will instead try to portray the FBI as victims, not perpetrators, of lies and deception.
“This case is likely the last real test for Durham’s office to justify its years-long investigation into possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, adding that it “will only add fodder to critics of Durham’s office who believe that his prosecutions have failed to get to the core of his mandate to investigate the genesis of the Russian collusion allegations, but instead have only charged individuals with more technical violations.”
A former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering a government email to justify secret surveillance of the former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. Clinesmith was sentenced to a year of probation. In May, a jury in D.C. federal court acquitted the only other defendant who went to trial as part of Durham’s investigation, cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann, who also was accused of lying to the FBI.
The Danchenko indictment has gotten a skeptical reception from the federal judge presiding over the matter, and much of the case Durham wanted to present won’t be weighed by the jury.
At a hearing last month, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga allowed the case to proceed to trial but said it was “an extremely close call” whether Danchenko’s statements to the FBI could even be prosecuted.
This month, Trenga ruled that Durham’s team cannot raise the most salacious allegations in the Steele dossier — concerning Trump, the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and unproven claims about a “pee tape” featuring prostitutes — that investigators say they traced back to Danchenko and his purported sources.
Trenga, a senior judge who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, and who sits on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also barred other pieces of evidence Durham had hoped to show jurors.
“Danchenko’s allegedly false statements regarding his sourcing of the Ritz-Carlton allegations do not qualify as direct evidence,” Trenga wrote in an order Oct. 4. He added: “Why Steele characterized the sources for the Ritz-Carlton allegations as he did in the Report or, indeed, whether the listed sources, in fact, came from Danchenko are subject to a significant degree of speculation.”
Steele himself might be able to shed light on Danchenko’s claims, but he is not expected to testify. Neither is Sergei Millian, the former president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, who prosecutors say Danchenko lied about during his FBI interviews.
That poses another challenge for Durham: narrating a complex story to the jury about claims Danchenko made to the FBI, about previous claims he made to Steele, about information he supposedly received from Millian and others — all of it without Millian or Steele providing their own versions of events.
Durham and his team did not respond to a request for comment.
The indictment and filings submitted in the case are dense and technical, with some focusing on the proper grammatical way to parse FBI questions and Danchenko’s responses. For example, Danchenko’s attorneys argue that some of his statements to the FBI in 2017 — that he “believed” it was Millian who reached out to him anonymously in a phone call and shared information about Trump and Russia — were “literally true” and thus not a crime.
Stuart A. Sears, an attorney for Danchenko, argued at a hearing last month: “If Rudy Giuliani says he believes the 2020 election was fraudulent, that doesn’t make it a false statement. He believes it.”
Mintz said: “This will be a difficult case for prosecutors because there is ambiguity in the facts, and prosecutors will have to prove Danchenko intended to mislead the FBI during his questioning as part of its investigation. While lying to federal agents is a crime, without more serious underlying charges it may be difficult to convince jurors that this case matters.”
Judge declines to toss John Durham case against Steele dossier source
U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga ruled Thursday that Danchenko’s case must be weighed by a jury, clearing the way for his trial next month. But it was “an extremely close call,” Trenga said from the bench.
The ruling is a victory, if only a temporary one, for Durham — who was asked by former attorney general William P. Barr in 2019, during the Trump administration, to investigate the FBI’s 2016 Russia investigation. Durham’s investigation came to focus in large part on the FBI’s use of the so-called “Steele dossier,” a collection of claims about Trump compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
But the judge’s remark that the decision was difficult could be an ominous sign, as Durham still must convince jurors Danchenko is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The special counsel’s investigation suffered a setback in May when another person charged with lying to the FBI, cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann, was acquitted by a jury in D.C. federal court. Danchenko’s trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 11 in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Durham argued the case personally at the hearing Thursday.
The jury will be asked to weigh statements Danchenko, who has pleaded not guilty, made during FBI interviews in 2017 about a longtime Washington PR executive aligned with Democrats, Charles Dolan Jr., and a former president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, Sergei Millian.
Key to the case is whether those statements from Danchenko to the FBI were willful deceptions that had a material effect on the government’s efforts to verify the claims in the dossier, a series of reports by Steele, based on information from Danchenko and others. Steele had been hired to produce the reports by research firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by a law firm that represented Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee.
Danchenko’s defense team asked the judge to dismiss the five-count indictment in a legal brief filed Sept. 2, arguing that Danchenko made “equivocal and speculative statements” to the FBI about “subjective” beliefs.
Danchenko’s prosecution, they said, was “a case of extraordinary government overreach.”
“The law criminalizes only unambiguously false statements that are material to a specific decision of the government,” Danchenko attorneys Stuart A. Sears and Danny Onorato wrote, adding that the FBI’s questions at issue “were fundamentally ambiguous, Mr. Danchenko’s answers were literally true, non-responsive, or ambiguous, and the statements were not material to a specific government decision.”
“If Rudy Giuliani says he believes the 2020 election was fraudulent, that doesn’t make it a false statement,” Sears argued in court Thursday. “He believes it.”
Durham’s team countered that the FBI’s questions were clear and that, in any event, settling disputes over contested facts is a job reserved for a jury.
An FBI agent asked Danchenko a “decidedly straightforward” question about Dolan during a June 15, 2017, interview, Durham’s team asserted in a brief filed Sept. 16.
“But you had never talked to Chuck Dolan about anything that showed up in the dossier, right?” the agent asked, according to court filings.
“No,” Danchenko replied.
“You don’t think so?” the agent asked.
“No. We talked about, you know, related issues perhaps but no, no, no, nothing specific,” Danchenko said.
The special counsel said the context in which the interview was taking place should have made clear that Danchenko was being asked about the sources behind the claims in the Steele dossier. The indictment alleges that at least one allegation in the Steele dossier “reflected information that Danchenko collected directly” from Dolan — despite Danchenko’s denial that they had discussed anything “specific” in it.
Danchenko asked Dolan via email about Paul Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, and Dolan replied with information that closely matched what was in an Aug. 22 report from Steele, the indictment says.
But Danchenko’s attorneys argued: “The most reasonable reading of this question is whether Mr. Danchenko and [Dolan] talked about the Company Reports themselves after they were published.”
“Mr. Danchenko’s answer to this question was literally true because he never talked to [Dolan] about the specific allegations contained in the Company Reports themselves, but they did talk about issues ‘related’ to the allegations later published in those reports,” Danchenko’s attorneys wrote.
They added that the FBI agent’s question was imprecisely worded because an email exchange between Danchenko and Dolan was not the same as “talking,” which is the word the FBI agent used during the interview.
“Talking refers to communication through spoken words, not in writing,” the attorneys argued.
At the hearing Thursday, Durham argued that “in the current-day lexicon, ‘talking’ has different meanings.”
“He knew exactly what the FBI was looking for; he knew the context of what was being asked of him,” Durham said, adding that Danchenko did not produce the email exchange about Manafort to investigators as he was turning over other materials. Danchenko’s attorneys said in a court filing that the information in the Steele dossier at issue actually came “from public news sources,” not Dolan.
Danchenko’s attorneys also argued that his statements to the FBI in 2017 — that he “believed” Millian had reached out to him anonymously in a phone call and shared information about Trump and Russia — were “literally true” and could not be deemed a criminal lie.
Durham said an email showed that Danchenko had never spoken to Millian as of Aug. 8, 2016. Danchenko had claimed the anonymous caller reached out to him weeks before that date, prosecutors allege.
“He knows that that didn’t happen, that it was not Millian who called him,” Durham said.
The special counsel’s team previously disclosed that Millian has not been located. Danchenko’s attorneys argued separately on Thursday that several emails from Millian to a Russian journalist that pertain to Danchenko should not be admitted as evidence in the trial “without allowing Mr. Danchenko the opportunity to cross-examine Millian.”
Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.
The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.
Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.
The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.
Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.
But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.
The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.
A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.
The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.
“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”
Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.
Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.
The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.
Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Steele defends claims about Russian collusion from his dossier
For former British spy Christopher Steele, it’s “No Time to Lie.”
Steele defended the explosive claims in his controversial dossier that became the catalyst for the investigation into whether former President Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele says in the documentary, ”Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” which premieres on Hulu Monday.
Steele, a former MI6 agent, said in an excerpt of the documentary aired on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that he wants to “set the record” straight about the dossier that was eventually debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In the interview, Steele insisted that his claim that Michael Cohen, then Trump’s self-described fixer, traveled to Prague in 2016 for secret meetings with Russian officials is true.
Cohen denied the claim and the FBI found no evidence of a meeting.
“Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100 percent accurate,” Steele said. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”
Cohen, who has since broken ties with Trump, told ABC News that “I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and that Elvis is still alive.”
Steele is less confident about the salacious “pee tape” episode contained in his dossier.
It alleged that Trump hired prostitutes in 2013 to urinate in front of him on a bed in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton where the Obamas had once stayed — an incident supposedly captured on video by Russian intelligence officials.
Steele said the alleged tape “probably does” exist — but that he “wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.”
Like many of the other claims in the dossier, the “pee tape” was dismissed as being based on hearsay.
Trump has denied the claims.
Stephanopoulos asked Steele why the tape, if it exists, has yet to be released.
“It hasn’t needed to be released,” he responded.
“Why not?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the US,” Steele said.
The Steele Dossier began as a project to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidates, and the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, provided the funding to research firm Fusion GPS.
But the research ended in 2016 when it became apparent Trump would clinch the Republican nomination.
At that point, the Free Beacon withdrew its funding and the project was picked up by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Ex-Intel official who created controversial Trump Russia dossier speaks out
In a clip from an upcoming ABC News documentary released Sunday, Steele said he decided to sit down for an interview now because he wanted to “set the record straight” about his role in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. ABC released a portion of the documentary featuring parts of Steele’s interview on Sunday, with the full documentary slated to be released on Hulu early Monday morning.
“Most of the world first heard your name about five years ago, but you stayed silent up until now. Why speak out now?” host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I think the first and most important (reason) is that the problems we identified back in 2016 haven’t gone away, and arguably have actually got worse, and I thought it was important to come and set the record straight,” Steele said.
Steele’s unverified dossier became one of the most controversial aspects of the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia that led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Many of the claims, such as the so-called “pee tape,” were never proven, despite the FBI’s efforts to verify salacious allegations and years of congressional investigators looking into the claims involving the former president and Russia.
Mueller’s report also concluded that another allegation Steele made — that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveled to Prague in 2016 to meet with Russian officials — was untrue.
Steele reinforced his belief that most of the claims made in the dossier are accurate.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele said.
The FBI’s use of Steele’s dossier to obtain a foreign surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was the subject of a scathing Justice Department inspector general report released in 2019. The report found the FBI’s Russia investigation was started properly, but it raised serious questions about Steele’s sources for the dossier, including the fact that his primary source told the FBI they may have talked about Trump’s alleged sexual activities “in jest” and that the tape was “rumor and speculation.”
Steele reaffirmed his confidence in the most controversial claim in the unverified dossier — that Russia had video of Trump watching prostitutes urinate in a hotel suite, according to BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier in full. In January 2017, CNN reported top intelligence officials presented then-President Trump with claims from the Steele Dossier. There is no evidence the tape exists, and Trump has denied the alleged incident taking place.
Steele said he believes Russia likely retains “kompromat” against Trump, and when pressed by ABC if he believes Russia has a tape of Trump with prostitutes in a Russian hotel, Steele said the tape “probably” exists, but that Russia has assessed “it hasn’t needed to be released.”
“And today, do you still believe that that tape exists?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I think it probably does, but I wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it,” Steele said.
“So how do you explain that if the tape does indeed exist, it hasn’t been released?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Well, it hasn’t needed to be released,” Steele said. “I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was President of the US.”
Steele stood by many of the claims made in his initial dossier, including Cohen’s travel to Prague. Cohen denied under oath ever traveling to the Czech Republic during a Congressional hearing in 2019 and has cooperated with investigators looking into Trump. A 2019 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general showed the FBI proved Cohen did not travel to Prague in 2016.
Steele rationalized that Cohen may still be lying about traveling to Prague despite cooperating with investigators on other matters, saying the trip to Prague would be “very self-incriminating to a very great degree.”
“Since he’s gone to prison, since he’s turned on President Trump, he’s told every single story. Why wouldn’t he admit to this?,” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I think it’s so incriminating and demeaning,” Steele said. “And the other reason is he might be scared of the consequences.”
In a statement to CNN, Michael Cohen refuted Steele’s claims, saying, “I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and that Elvis is still alive.”
When asked if he believes the credibility of his dossier has suffered after the Justice Department inspector general could not prove his claim about Cohen’s trip to Prague, Steele said he is “yet to be convinced” Cohen did not travel to Prague.
“Do you think it hurts your credibility and all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100% accurate. I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them,” Steele said.