What to Make of Durham’s Latest Indictment By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/what-to-make-of-durhams-latest-indictment/
For the next few days, expect the new Washington parlor game to be identifying the Democratic Party operative who was allegedly a source for Igor Danchenko’s dossier claims.
J ustice Department special counsel John Durham has indicted Igor Danchenko, the principal sub-source for the discredited “Steele dossier,” which was relied on by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants in its investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Durham alleges that Danchenko falsely denied to the FBI that some of the information he supplied for the dossier came from a long-time Democratic Party operative who is not identified by name in the indictment.
Moreover, Danchenko is also alleged to have falsely claimed that he had been told of a well-developed “conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials by a man identified in the indictment as president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
In Ball of Collusion, my 2019 book on the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, I summarized media reports fingering Sergey Millian, who founded this portentous-sounding but sketchy “Chamber.” I pointed out that Millian did not appear to have the kind of relationship with Donald Trump that he would know of such a “conspiracy of cooperation” if it were true, and that Steele himself had confided in friends that he worried Millian was an unreliable “big talker.”
If Durham’s allegations are borne out, it would mean that Millian was not talking at all — at least on this subject. Danchenko was making it up, according to the indictment.
Filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C., the indictment charges Danchenko with five counts of lying to federal investigators — specifically in several 2017 interviews by the FBI. Each charge carries a potential term of up to five years’ imprisonment.
Danchenko is a U.S.-based Russian national who, among other things, worked for the Brookings Institution in Washington. In particular, he worked at Brookings with foreign-relations and national-security expert Fiona Hill — who later worked in President Trump’s National Security Council and, coincidentally, was a key witness in the first Trump impeachment (related to the Ukraine controversy, which was unrelated to the Trump/Russia “collusion” investigation). As the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross observes, it was Hill who introduced Danchenko to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign to generate the Steele dossier.
The campaign was represented by the Perkins-Coie law firm, which retained Fusion-GPS, an intelligence firm that specializes in political-opposition research. Fusion’s co-founder, Glenn Simpson, recruited Steele for the Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia research project. Steele got much of the information from Danchenko, with whom he had a preexisting professional relationship (through Steele’s London-based intelligence firm, Orbis).
As I’ve previously detailed, Durham appears to be operating from the premise that the Trump-Russia narrative, in which Trump was framed as a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin’s regime, was manufactured by the Clinton campaign, which generated the dossier and peddled its information to the media and the government. This enabled the campaign to argue to the electorate not only that Trump was a Putin puppet but that the FBI was investigating him over it.
In September, Durham indicted Perkins-Coie partner Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI in connection with an allegation that a major Russian financial institution, Alfa Bank, was a conduit for covert Internet communications between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Specifically, Durham alleges that Sussmann falsely told the FBI’s general counsel that he was not representing any client in bringing Alfa Bank information to the FBI; in reality, according to the indictment, he was working for the Clinton campaign and for a tech executive who was expecting a job in the anticipated Clinton administration.
Sussmann resigned from Perkins-Coie after he was indicted. His case is separate from Danchenko’s — they are indicted in the same investigation, but they are not co-defendants.
For the next few days, expect the new Washington parlor game to be identifying the Democratic Party operative who was allegedly a source for Danchenko’s dossier claims. The indictment alleges that “PR Executive-1” had strong Russian contacts — organizing events in Moscow and interacting with Russian nationals.
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