A federal judge rejected an effort by Igor Danchenko to use certain classified information in the upcoming trial brought by special counsel John Durham against the alleged main source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier.
Danchenko was charged last year with five counts of making false statements to the FBI. Durham says the comments were about the information Danchenko provided for the Steele dossier. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that Danchenko eventually undermined Steele’s unfounded claims of a “well-developed conspiracy” between former President Donald Trump and Russia.
There were dueling sealed motions by the prosecution and defense this month related to the possible use of certain pieces of classified information during trial, though details on the contents of the filings were scant. Durham’s team filed a motion on its “objections concerning use, relevance, and admissibility of classified information” in mid-August following a motion by Danchenko’s team on its “intent to use classified information” earlier in the month. Durham won that battle on Friday.
U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga, who is handling the case, said he had “carefully reviewed” Durham’s classified motion “ex parte” — likely meaning only with Durham and not Danchenko present — and “in camera” behind closed doors and outside of public view, concluding that Durham was in the right.
The judge found that Durham’s motion was “properly filed” and that “none of the classified information referenced in the Government’s Motion is relevant and helpful to the defense, or that to the extent that any of the classified information is relevant and helpful, the proposed summaries or substitutions properly provide that information to the defense without compromising non-discoverable sources and methods.”
INSIDE TRUMP’S CHAOTIC RUSSIA INVESTIGATION DECLASSIFICATION SAGA
Danchenko, a Russia-born lawyer, has lived and worked in the Washington, D.C., area for many years, allegedly relying on a network of Russian contacts for the dossier project. But he has been accused of undermining key collusion claims when interviewed by the FBI.
Danchenko was interviewed in January, March, and May 2017. Horowitz said Danchenko’s January 2017 interview with FBI officials “raised doubts about the reliability of Steele’s descriptions of information.”
According to Durham, Danchenko anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent many years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government.
Durham’s indictment also says Danchenko 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 he told him about a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between Trump and the Russians.
Trenga was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2008, and he has also been on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 2020.
“The Court also finds that the withholdings authorized by this Order are consistent with the Government’s discovery obligations,” the judge concluded on Friday, adding, “The Court finds that the classified information referenced in the Government’s Motion … implicates the Government’s classified information privilege because the information is properly classified.”
Durham said in early August that the prosecution was on track with producing discovery for the defense, and there is another status conference in September. Durham’s team said in May that it had produced to the defense over 5,000 documents in classified discovery. The special counsel noted then that “recent world events in Ukraine have contributed to delays in the production of classified discovery.”
Durham did the talking for the prosecution during a brief Danchenko hearing in early August, and he filed a short notice with the federal court, saying, “I appear in this case as counsel for the United States of America.” Durham also told the judge the Danchenko trial was expected to last five or six days.
Danchenko’s attorney raised the issue of possible anti-Russian bias tainting the northern Virginia jury pool during the early August hearing. The lawyer backed up the claim by noting there are a number of Ukrainian flags around Alexandria following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A court filing by Durham last month requested that the court issue 30 subpoenas for possible witness testimony for the trial starting Oct. 11.
Durham asked the court earlier this month to “please withdraw the appearance” of Andrew DeFilippis, an assistant special counsel, from the case against Danchenko. The move came less than a month after it appeared Durham had personally taken the reins ahead of the trial.
Steele was working for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, before, during, and after his time targeting Trump. The former MI6 agent was hired to put his anti-Trump dossier together by an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, which was simultaneously working for Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, of the now-infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Fusion GPS was hired by Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias and was paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
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The October trial against Danchenko comes after a lawyer for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Michael Sussmann, was found not guilty in May, a blow to Durham’s investigation.
Sussmann had been charged with allegedly concealing two clients, technology executive Rodney Joffe and Clinton’s campaign, from FBI general counsel James Baker when Sussmann pushed debunked allegations of a secret line of communication between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank.
