I won’t take credit for going two-for-two on predictions regarding the trial of Igor Danchenko because anybody paying attention should have realized these would come to pass: First, at the close of the prosecution’s presentation of evidence, Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed one of the five false-statement charges against the defendant; second, Danchenko is relying on his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and thus will not take the stand in his own defense.
As noted in a column previewing the trial earlier this week, the count alleging that Danchenko concealed the identity of longtime Clinton ally Charles Dolan as his source for information about the Trump campaign that ended up in the Steele dossier was vague as drafted. Danchenko first denied to the FBI that Dolan was the source, but then added that he had discussed “related issues” with Dolan. For a statement to be grist for a false-statement charge, the burden is on the government questioner to clear up any ambiguity, and the FBI didn’t.
More precisely — and this is the part Judge Trenga homed in on — the FBI asked Danchenko if he “talked to [Dolan] about anything that showed up in the dossier.” Danchenko’s relevant communications with Dolan were in emails. From this, Danchenko’s counsel argued that his denial of talking was literally true — he was using the term in its common understanding of a spoken conversation, not written communications. Yes, Danchenko may have intended to mislead, but again, the burden is on the questioner to pin down the witness, not on the witness to clear up possible confusion.
All that said, this was a very strange charge in any event. What Danchenko and Dolan communicated about was trivial — the question of why Paul Manafort might have been ejected as chairman of the 2016 Trump campaign. Dolan said he would check around and came back with a bunch of gossip about campaign infighting that sounded exactly like what all of us were reading and hearing in contemporary news accounts.
Well . . . turns out Dolan lied to Danchenko: He did not, as he claimed, pry this jejune information out of a GOP drinking buddy; he got it from news accounts and passed it along as if it were inside information (something that should have been familiar to Danchenko, a practitioner of that tactic — according to the FBI analysts who wondered why the bureau was paying him $200K as an informant when so much of what he provided was public information). But in any event, the judge is probably doing special counsel John Durham a favor. In a case where the main evidence was about government agents misleading a federal court under oath in portraying the sitting president of the United States as a clandestine agent of Russia, the jury may have wondered why, instead of weighing charges related to that, it was being asked to waste its time on Paul Manafort
As I explained on Tuesday, there was also no way Danchenko was going to testify. His counsel teed up his defense to portray the government’s proof as woefully insufficient, including on the four remaining counts, related to Sergei Millian. Danchenko is alleged to have made up communications with Millian, whom he never met, never had a discussion of any kind with, and doesn’t know. Unlike the Manafort piffle, Danchenko claimed the Millian communication was how he learned the blockbuster intel that Trump was in cahoots with Putin — the heart of the “collusion” narrative that was, of course, bogus.
It was Danchenko’s good fortune that Millian is out of the country and refused to testify, so Durham does not have a direct witness on these counts. If Danchenko had taken the stand, he would have been the direct witness. Plus, he would have opened himself up to cross-examination about his interactions with Russian operatives over a decade ago that caused the FBI to suspect he was a Kremlin asset — information his lawyers worked very hard to try to exclude from the jury’s hearing. There would have been too much risk in testifying, so declining to do so was a no-brainer.
Summations start Monday.