![]() He only guessed that Millian might have been the caller when the FBI asked him to speculate. 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.ĭanchenko's lawyers, as a starting point, maintain that Danchenko never said he talked with Millian. Prosecutors said Danchenko's story made no sense. 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.ĭanchenko 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 lied about the identity of his own sources for the material he gave to Steele. ![]() Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele of Orbis Business Intelligence compiled the Trump dossier. 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.įILE - A view of the building where offices of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd are located, in central London, Jan. Prosecutors said that if Danchenko had been more honest about his sources, the FBI might not have treated the dossier so credulously. Trump derided the dossier as fake news and a political witch hunt when it became public in 2017.ĭanchenko, 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. Most famously, it alleged that the Russians could have blackmail material on Trump for his supposed interactions with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. The Danchenko case was the first of the three to delve deeply into the origins of the "Steele dossier," a compendium of allegations compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that Trump's 2016 presidential campaign was colluding with the Kremlin. The sole conviction - an FBI agent 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 across-the-board acquittals. Federal Courthouse in Washington, May 17, 2022.ĭespite hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, and then his presidency, the investigation over the course of more than three years failed to produce evidence that met those expectations. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.FILE - Special Counsel John Durham departs the U.S. This source was revealed on Thursday to be Chuck Dolan, a public relations executive who had Russian contacts, and referred to as “PR Executive-1” in the indictment. As I recounted in my book on Russiagate, “Ball of Collusion,” Millian denied being a source and trashed the dossier as “fake news created by sick minds.”ĭanchenko is also alleged to have concealed that one of his sources for the information he provided to Steele was a longtime Democratic Party operative who was close to the Clintons - having worked on both of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaigns and Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. After the Steele dossier became public, however, there was intense speculation that the chamber’s founder, Sergey Millian, was a Steele dossier source. The chamber president is not identified by name in the indictment. ![]() ![]() In reality, the indictment says, this conversation never happened. Department of Justice via AP, Fileįirst, he fabricated the claim that the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce informed him that, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump was involved in a well-developed “conspiracy of cooperation” with the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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