United States v Igor Danchenko

The indictment last week of Igor Danchenko by John Durham contains some surprises.  More than anything it reinforces THC's belief that his theory about what really happened in the Russia Collusion matter is correct.  Does it presage more indictments?  Probably.  Will it reach into the agencies and the Clinton campaign?  I don't know. There are clearly many shady and unethical actions by a lot of players here but to what extent they are also illegal is to be determined, as well as Durham's willingness to go there.  This recent column from former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy puts it this way:

. . . many things that smack of abuse of power are not prosecutable crimes. The law necessarily gives government officials a wide berth to use aggressive investigative measures based on dubious suspicions. It is easy to see the abuse, but much harder to establish it as a crime. That is why a system that fails to hold abusive officials politically accountable will be a failed system. Establishing their criminal guilt is much harder.

However, I have noticed something recently - several key players in the matter have gone silent on twitter.  Andrew Weissmann, Robert Mueller's ventriloquist, was a prolific poster but has been absent since early July.  John Brennan was a frequent tweeter but since early March has only posted twice, in April and May, and been otherwise quiet.  James Comey, another frequent voice on twitter, last posted in January (other than a Sept 11 memorial post).  Have they been advised by counsel to be quiet?

Before discussing the specifics of the indictment and, more importantly, where it fits into the overall picture let's review the key cast of characters using their designations in the indictment, in which only Danchenko is directly named.

Cast of Characters In Order of Appearance In The Indictment

Starring Igor Danchenko.  Born in the Soviet Union in 1978, Danchenko emigrated to the U.S. in the early 2000s where he graduated from the University of Louisville, with a degree in Political Science.  Shortly thereafter he obtained a job at the Brookings Institution (a Democratic think tank) in DC and also got a master's degree from Georgetown.  In 2009 the FBI opened an investigation on him "after he had reportedly told two associates from the Brookings Institution that he knew of a way they could 'make a little extra money' if they were able to 'get a job in the government and had access to classified information'".  The investigation revealed he had prior contacts with Russian intelligence officers but in 2011 the investigation was dropped when he left the country.  When Danchenko later returned to the U.S., the FBI was unaware and did not restart the investigation.  Hired by Steele in 2016, Danchenko became the primary source for the Steele Dossier.  Danchenko is a Russian citizen, lawfully residing in the U.S.

Christopher Steele as UK Person 1.  Former British intelligence.  Worked for several Putin connected Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska.  Retained by Glenn Simpson at FusionGPS to investigate Trump-Russia ties.  Hated Trump.  Loved Hillary.  You know the rest.

Perkins Coie as Law Firm 1.  An international law firm with more than 1,000 lawyers, headquartered in Seattle.  Formerly the home of Marc Elias, counsel and fixer to the Clinton Campaign and virtually every other significant national Democratic organization, and who hired FusionGPS to investigate Trump-Russia times.  Formerly the home of Michael Sussmann, recently indicted by John Durham for making false statements to federal officials related to the fake story allegedly connecting the Trump Organization with the Russia owned Alfa Bank.  Sussmann also oversaw the investigation of the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, after being brought into the situation by Elias.

FusionGPS as US Investigative Firm 1. Headed by Glenn Simpson, former investigative reporter who opposed Trump.  Hired Christopher Steele and worked for Marc Elias at Perkins Coie.  Also worked for Putin connected Russian oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska, on whose behalf he lobbied American legislators to revoke the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on a number of Putin connected figures. In this connection he worked closely with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who set up the June 2016 meeting with Donald "Fredo" Trump Jr at the Trump Tower.  Simpson met with Veselnitskaya the day before and day after the Trump Tower meeting. In his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Rinat Akhmetshin, a dual Russia/U.S. citizen who accompanied Veselnitskaya to the Trump Tower meeting, described Simpson as an "old acquaintance".  According to his testimony, Akhmetshin's business colleague Edward Lieberman, was married to Evelyn Lieberman, White House assistant to Hillary and later Deputy Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton who later became Director of Voice of America.  Akhmetshin had been to the Lieberman's home on several times and met Hillary on more than one occasion there.

Carter Page as Advisor 1.  The previously obscure Page, appointed to Trump's National Security Advisory Board in 2016, was portrayed in the Steele Dossier as the key go between the Russians and the Trump campaign, despite the fact the Board only met once, Page missed the meeting, and was never consulted on any foreign policy or security issue by the Trump campaign.  It was the October 2016 FISA warrant allowing surveillance of Page, subsequently renewed three times, that has been the subject of so much controversy and criticism by the Inspector General of DOJ.  Refusing to retain counsel and volunteering to be interviewed by the FBI and the Mueller Gang, Page emerged as the Most Innocent Man in America, never charged and free.

Sergei Millian as Chamber President 1.  Former president of Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.  Born in the Soviet Union, he moved to the U.S. in 2001 and had ties to Trump and the Trump Organization.  Described in the Steele Dossier as a "close associate" of Trump and widely reported to be one of the sources for the allegations in the Dossier.  Millian denied being a source and, according to the indictment, Danchenko lied and never spoke with him.

Special Guest Appearance by:

Fiona Hill as Think Tank Employee 1.  Hill, who also played a supporting part in the Ukraine Impeachment reality show, worked closely with Danchenko at Brookings, co-authoring an article with him and introducing her colleague to Christopher Steele and Charles H Dolan Jr.

And Introducing!

Charles H Dolan Jr as PR Executive 1.  Former executive director of the Democratic Governors' Association.  Virginia state chair for the Clinton-Gore campaigns in 1992 and 1996.  Senior communications consultant to the Kerry campaign in 2004.  Hillary Clinton campaign aide in 2008, in her run to gain the Democratic presidential nomination.  Was Senior VP for International Affairs where, from 2006 to 2014, he handled global public relations for the Putin government and for Gazprom, interacting with (according to the indictment) "senior Russian Federation leadership", including close relationships with Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, former Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kisylak (the guy Michael Flynn got indicted for speaking with) and with the head of the Russian Embassy's Economic Section.  Also, according to the indictment, a major source for Danchenko in assembling the Steele Dossier.  Dolan is currently employed as Senior VP at the PR firm of KGlobal which has recently removed all reference to him from its website.

Olga Galkina as Russian Sub-source 1.  Former schoolmate of Danchenko and, allegedly, a major source for the Steele Dossier.  Was working in Cyprus for a web-service company owned by Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev.  Reportedly, Galkina was the source for the alleged trip of Michael Cohen to Prague and that Gubarev was involved with the hackers who broke into the DNC.  Galkina has denied any link to the Dossier, a link first reported by the Wall St Journal in October 2020.  According to the indictment in 2016 Galkina sent a message to a Russia based associate that Dolan had written a letter to Peskov supporting her candidacy for a position in the Russian Presidential Administration.  Around the same time, Galkina sent an email to Dolan after he informed her he would be attending a reception for Hillary Clinton that, "Tell her please she has a big fan in Cyprus".  A month later she sent a message to a Russian associate describing Dolan as a Clinton advisor, adding, "When Dolan take me off to the State Department [to handle] issues of the former USSR, then we'll see who is looking good and who is not."

The Alleged Crime

According to the indictment, "the FBI relied substantially on the Company Reports [Steele Dossier] in these FISA applications to assert probable cause that [Carter Page] was a witting agent of the Russian Federation."

Danchenko is charged with five counts of making false statements to agents of the FBI between March and November of 2017.  One of the counts involves denying that he knew Charles Dolan, while the other four all relate to alleged false statements regarding interactions with Sergei Millian.

The Implications

It was well-known before the indictment that Danchenko was Steele's primary source and that the Steele Dossier itself was garbage.  What the indictment does is add a few previously unknown elements and provide additional context to the biggest domestic political scandal in American history.

We had not previously known of the involvement of Charles H Dolan Jr in the creation of the dossier.  It is significant since he is a figure with connections to both the Clintons and the current Russian government and oligarchs (that he and Olga Galkina were in direct contact is startling). I also read the indictment as implying that Dolan is now cooperating with the Durham investigation - because Dolan's fabricated statement were made to Danchenko, not to a government official, he is in less legal jeopardy. 

There is this curious, and recurring theme, with the Russia collusion matter, where individuals keep popping up with these dual connections - Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, Rinat Akhmetshin, Danchenko, and now Charles Dolan.  It's gotten to the point where even on matters where I was inclined to go along with the conventional wisdom, as in that it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC, I now don't know what to think with the revelation of Sussmann's role in creating the false Russia collusion narrative.

It goes back to an issue I raised back in 2019.  I think it understandable why the original investigation into the Trump campaign was opened in July 2016, given the allegations, though it is also true that by early 2017 enough was known to shut it down and there was never any justification for appointing Special Counsel.

But given what we now know, why didn't the FBI ever open an investigation of the Clinton campaign?

At some point, the FBI became aware that the Clinton campaign had paid for the Steele Dossier.  It was using the Steele Dossier, which purported to contain information from Russian intelligence sources damaging to Clinton's opponent, to get the FBI to begin an investigation, while at the same time parts of it were being leaked to the media in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI was unable to corroborate the contents of the Dossier and the Mueller gang essentially disavowed the entire document, not even mentioning it in the Russian influence section of its report.  Further the mix of suspicious Russian connections of many of the participants (see above) became known to the FBI.

And given what the FBI was finding out, let's provide some more historical context.

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State to President Obama, who was openly endorsed by the Kremlin in 2008 and 2012 as Putin made it clear he hated McCain and Romney.

In 2009, SoS Clinton announced the Russian "reset" in which she blamed all the problems in the US-Russia relationship on George Bush.

During her time as SoS, the Clinton Foundation took in tens of millions in contributions from Russian oligarchs and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow.

During the 2012 campaign Barack Obama was caught on an open mic telling Russian Prime Minister Medvedev to let Putin know he'd "have more flexibility after the election".

In 2015 the FBI learned that when Hillary became SoS in 2009, that rather than follow government security requirements she set up her own email and server system, leaving it open to penetration by foreign governments such as Russia and China.  In summary, given a choice that her emails might one day be available to the public under FOIA or risk that Russia and China might end up with them, she chose Russia and China.

Given this record how could there have not been enough indicia to open an investigation of the Clinton campaign?

Of course, I'm asking a rhetorical question.  We know the answer.

On July 5, 2016 James Comey announced Hillary Clinton would not face charges in the email matter.  To do so, he converted a strict liability statute into one requiring negligence which was simply irresponsible as a legal matter. But he needed to do so to enable Hillary to beat Trump.  That took precedence over everything.  We know that Comey's deputies, McCabe and Strzok were on board with the program.  Beating Trump was everything and nothing would interfere with that agenda.  The decks needed to be cleared.  Three weeks later the FBI started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

I've seen some discussion that the allegation that Danchenko lied to the FBI somehow absolves the FBI and the Mueller Gang.  It doesn't and one of the reasons for that is embedded within the indictment itself.  Page 17 contains a long verbatim passage from the FBI's questioning of Danchenko on June 15, 2017 in which he is specifically asked about Charles Dolan and his connection to the Steele Dossier.  Danchenko denies Dolan was a source, but the real significance is by that point the FBI knew or suspected that Dolan was involved in some way.  That interview was conducted under the auspices of Mueller, who, by that time, was Special Counsel and in combination with the failure to authenticate the Dossier over the prior months, as reported by Horowitz in his IG Report, demonstrates that, when later that month, Mueller and his team filed for renewal of the Page FISA Warrant and certified to the truthfulness and reliability of the Steele Dossier, they were lying.

What is more apparent than ever is that one thread (1) of the events in 2016 was a Clinton directed effort to create a collusion narrative, helped along by Trump's own idiotic statements which gave it a surface plausibility.  For the FBI it fit into how its senior people in DC thought about the election and Trump.  But after the November election, and Trump's unexpected victory, it became about something else, covering their tracks and undermining the new administration.

For Hillary Clinton it was about refusing to acknowledge the results of the election and her humiliating defeat.  A new narrative needed to be created and her supporters were willing to put a lot of money into that effort, the media was willing to play along and as were significant elements within the federal government.

In April 2020 I wrote that the purpose of the Mueller investigation was:

Try to entrap the President into an obstruction of justice case.

Cripple the ability of the administration to govern.

Provide occasional irrelevant indictments that would generate news hooks for the Trump-hating media.

Provide copious leaks to the friendly news media to create the illusion that the investigation was so very, very close to cracking the case against these horrible people, all to provide a continuing stream of stories helpful to the Democrats leading up to the 2018 mid-terms.

I still think that correct, but now believe I also underestimated how much of this was about ensuring the actual story of what happened in 2016 would not surface.

It's why the Mueller investigation let stories run wild with their media allies even when they knew they were false.  The Mueller Report was released in April 2019 and many were baffled because of the absence of the Steele Dossier, which they anticipated would be the centerpiece.  Mueller knew two years earlier about the failure to verify the Dossier.  His team knew they needed to stay away from it because the deeper anyone looked the more they would realize how tainted it was and how connected to the Clinton campaign.  But, in the meantime they would do nothing to undermine the Dossier and encourage the press to run with it.

The same thing happened with the Trump Tower meeting.  Within a few days of it becoming public in 2017, Mueller interviewed Anatoli Samachornov, the interpreter and only credible participant in that fiasco.  His story was consistent with Donald "Fredo" Trump Jr's.  With that the Mueller team lost interest but not only left the story out there for the next two years, but then Andrew Weissmann wrote a long section in the report about the meeting, skillfully implying with the use of adjectives and adverbs, that something shady must have occurred but never actually accusing anyone while ignoring Samachornov's testimony supporting Trump Jr. 

The pattern goes all the way back to the beginning of 2017 when, on January 27, Trump and James Comey had their private dinner at the White House. This is what transpired:

The President brought up the Steele report that Comey had raised in the January 6, 2017 briefing and stated that he was thinking about ordering the FBI to investigate the allegations to prove they were false. Comey responded that the President should think carefully about issuing such an order because it could create a narrative that the FBI was investigating him personally, which was incorrect.  

With that, Trump backed off.  The quote above is taken directly from the Mueller report and it is sourced to James Comey's own account, written immediately after the dinner.

At that point all Trump knew was that on January 6, Comey had told him about the Dossier, specifically mentioned the alleged hotel romp with prostitutes and peeing on the bed, which prompted an outraged response from Trump.  Three days later the media suddenly began reporting on the Dossier using the hook that the President had been briefed on it, prompting a public firestorm.

Why would the FBI Director try to persuade the President not to order an investigation?  Because Comey knew many things Trump did not.

Comey knew that the Dossier had been the key to getting the FISA Court to allow surveillance of Carter Page in October 2016.  As part of that process, Comey signed a statement supporting the reliability of the assertions made in the warrant application.  In fact, just two weeks prior to the dinner with Trump, Comey had signed a renewal application for the warrant, containing the same statement of reliability.  Yet Comey also knew by that time the FBI had not yet been able to validate the Dossier.  So the FBI was actually investigating the Dossier but it would be untenable for Comey to be in a situation where reports had to be made to Trump, or more specifically his then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who statutorily had to be read into national security investigations.  To do so would have led to the entire plot would be unraveled, the origins of the Dossier revealed, and Clinton's role exposed.

For all the talk of dangers to democracy let's do a compare and contrast.

The January 6 events in DC were an embarrassment and disgrace.  I would have supported more force by police to keep protestors from entering the building and wrote that the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove Trump during the last two weeks of his term but the protestors themselves were naive, easily manipulated fools.  What was the plan?

1.  Enter the Capitol

2.  Mill around

3. ??

4.  Trump reelected!

Now let's look at Russia Collusion.  What started as an effort to create a fantasy story to ensure Trump was not elected morphed into an effort to cover the tracks of those involved, while at the same time furthering the fantasy narrative in order to disrupt and discredit the Trump administration, possibly cause the removal of the President, and to impact elections.  The three year effort included unelected bureaucrats from inside the government, leading politicians from one of our parties, and most of the self-proclaimed "watchdog" media.  I don't expect much from politicians of either party but the active collaboration of the media in this fraud is a definite danger to democracy as is the realization of the power of the federal administrative state if it disagrees with the electoral choices of Americans.

If, as noted at the top of this post, there is not a political or societal accounting for what happened from 2016-19, it will constitute another major blow to the credibility of our institutions and democracy.

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(1) The second thread is the Josef Mifsud/George Papadopolous matter which led to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  This seems to have originated independently of the Clinton campaign, probably with the American or a friendly intelligence service.  In Ghostbusters' terms the two "streams crossed" in the late summer of 2016.  I hope Durham reveals what really happened.  And maybe I'm wrong.  The Australian diplomat and former intelligence director whose report triggered Crossfire Hurricane was also involved with the Clinton Foundation.