A jury has been selected and opening statements are set to begin Tuesday afternoon in the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko. Danchencko, you’ll recall, was the principal source of the discredited “Steele dossier,” the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign confabulation on which the FBI and Justice Department relied, in sworn surveillance-warrant applications to a secret federal court, to smear Clinton’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, as a clandestine agent of Russia.
Already, the handwriting is on the wall: This is not going too well for John Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the genesis of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe. Judge Anthony Trenga, the George W. Bush appointee who is presiding over Danchenko’s trial, is clearly skeptical about the prosecution. Though he declined to dismiss the charges pretrial, he appears poised to throw out at least one of the five counts once the government has presented its case, and he has sharply limited the evidence Durham will be permitted to introduce.
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