The alleged main Russian source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier has claimed anti-Russian bias could stop him from getting a fair trial.
Igor Danchenko’s lawyer, Danny Onorato, raised the issue during a pretrial hearing on Monday. The lawyer backed up the claim, noting there are a number of Ukrainian flags around Alexandria, Virginia, amid Russia’s invasion, which started in February.
The attorney suggested the defense team may try to find a way to address that issue in the questionnaire for jurors during the selection process in the trial, brought by special counsel John Durham.
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Danchenko was charged last year with five counts of making false statements to the FBI. Durham has claimed the comments were about the information he provided to Steele for the dossier. The Department of Justice’s watchdog said FBI interviews with Danchenko “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and concluded Danchenko undermined Steele’s unfounded claims of a “well-developed conspiracy” between former President Donald Trump and Russia.
The Russia-born lawyer has lived and worked in the Washington, D.C., area for many years and allegedly relied on a network of Russian contacts but undermined key collusion claims when interviewed by the FBI. According to Durham’s false statements charges, he anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort to longtime Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent many years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government.
Onorato said Monday the defense lawyers are cooperating with the special counsel’s office on gaining access to the necessary classified information ahead of trial, and the defense attorney said that “both parties are working well together.” Danchenko’s team declined to comment outside the courthouse.
Durham, dressed in a dark gray suit and white shirt with a red tie and sporting his trademark goatee, did the talking for the prosecution, introducing himself as “John Durham” and naming the other prosecutors who were with him Monday.
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U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga, who is handling the case, was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2008, and he has also been on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 2020.
The judge said he has a conflict in late October, but Durham said the trial was expected to last just five or six trial days. A court filing by Durham in mid-July requested that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issue “thirty subpoenas” for possible witness testimony for the trial starting on Oct. 11.
There is another status conference in September before the trial the month after.
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Durham’s indictment also says the Steele source lied about Sergei Millian, an American citizen born in Belarus who moved to the United States in the early 2000s and founded a trade group called the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. The prosecutor said Danchenko falsely told the FBI that in late July 2016, he had received a phone call from Millian in which Millian told him about a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between Trump and Russians.
The Danchenko trial comes after Democratic cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann was found not guilty earlier this year after being charged for reportedly concealing two of his clients from FBI General Counsel James Baker when he pushed debunked allegations of a secret line of communication between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank during a September 2016 meeting.
