In delivering the prosecution’s rebuttal summation in the Danchenko trial this morning, special counsel John Durham labeled the FBI “the elephant in the room.”
Durham was emphatic that in prosecuting Igor Danchenko for alleged lies about his sources for information that ended up in the bogus “Steele dossier,” the special counsel’s office was not defending the bureau. As reported by the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy, who is covering the trial, Durham concluded that “the FBI failed here,” observing that it “mishandled the investigation” and that its agents “didn’t do what they should have done.” Durham added that the explanation for the bureau’s appalling performance could be that it is “simply incompetent” or possibly that it was “working in coordination.” He does not appear to have stated with whom the FBI might have worked in coordination; the implication points to the Clinton campaign, which sponsored the dossier — opposition research based on which Hillary Clinton argued that Trump was a Putin puppet.
The case, which started with jury selection in federal district court in Alexandria, Va., just last Tuesday, is now in the jury’s hands. The panel began deliberations at around 1 p.m. As I have previously explained, there are four false-statements counts, all related to Danchenko’s alleged fabrication of a conversation with Sergei Millian, a loose associate of Trump’s with whom there is no evidence that Danchenko ever spoke. Danchenko’s lawyers are stressing that Millian did not testify and Durham could not disprove that a conversation may have taken place over an Internet app rather than a conventional phone — although they also insist that Danchenko never claimed to be sure that the person with whom he spoke was Millian.
Durham’s rebuttal remarks aimed at the FBI were induced, at least in part, by the summation of Danchenko lawyer Stuart Sears, who highlighted the testimony of the defendant’s FBI handler, Agent Kevin Helson. In his testimony, Helson claimed that Danchenko was a valuable informant whose termination as such harmed American national security. In his examination of Helson, Durham pointed out that Helson had failed to do basic due diligence about Danchenko, apparently failed to discover that the bureau had previously suspected him of being a Russian asset, and paid him $200,000 in taxpayers’ money over three years for intelligence, much of which came from “open sources” (i.e., publicly available information). Helson wanted to pay Danchenko another $346,000 in a lump sum, but the FBI nixed that.
According to the evidence in the trial, the FBI offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million if he could corroborate the sensational allegations against Trump set forth in the dossier, most of which were sourced to Danchenko. Steele could not verify them, and Danchenko described them as rumor, innuendo, and loose talk that he never intended to incorporate into reporting. He claimed not to know about the Steele dossier until it was published by Buzzfeed in early 2017.