Danchenko False-Statements Trial: Deception vs. Burden of Proof

In the false-statements trial of Igor Danchenko (see here, here, and here), the defendant, who was the principal source for British spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited “dossier” of anti-Trump reporting, is charged with lying about two of his sub-sources. Essentially, he is said to have concealed that he got some information about the Trump 2016 presidential campaign from a Clinton ally named Charles Dolan, and to have fabricated contact with a tangential Trump associate named Sergei Millian (with whom he allegedly had no actual contact).

In Special Counsel John Durham’s examination of the first prosecution witness, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, an issue arose that underscores why the case is uphill for Durham. It entails relevant emails. To put it succinctly, Danchenko had a number of email exchanges with Dolan, and he unsuccessfully tried to reach Millian by email. In his 2017 interviews by the FBI relevant to the Russiagate investigation, and in the years thereafter when the bureau kept him on the books as a paid intelligence informant, Danchenko did not reveal the existence of the emails.