Danchenko, Igor

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares119 Views

    Trump Sues Over Steele Dossier on Russia in London Court

    by

    Former President Donald J. Trump is arguing that the document known as the Steele dossier was calculated to embarrass him and that it breached data protection laws.Donald J. Trump has claimed in a lawsuit in a London court that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, inflicted “personal and reputational damage and distress” on him by leaking a dossier detailing unsavory, unproven accounts of links between him and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.Lawyers for Mr. Trump argue that Mr. Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, breached British data protection laws with the dossier, which triggered a political earthquake when it was published just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017.The lawsuit, the first filed by Mr. Trump in Britain related to the dossier, could offer the former president more favorable legal terrain than the United States. Last year, a federal judge in Florida threw out his lawsuit claiming that Mr. Steele, as well as Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, was involved in a concerted plot to spread false information about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.In a court filing last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said he was “compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing” for him, the filing said, asserting that Mr. Steele had presented the claims in a “sensationalist manner” that was “calculated to cause tremendous embarrassment” to Mr. Trump. He is asking for unspecified compensation.The High Court judge Matthew Nicklin has scheduled a two-day hearing on Oct. 16 and 17, at which arguments will be heard and lawyers for Mr. Steele’s firm will move to throw out the case, which was originally filed last November.The dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, center, in 2020. He has accused Mr. Trump of engaging in “frivolous and abusive legal proceedings” in the United States.Victoria Jones/Press Association, via Associated PressIn a witness statement, Mr. Steele accused Mr. Trump of “numerous public attacks upon me and Orbis.” He said the former president had initiated “frivolous and abusive legal proceedings” against him and his firm in the United States, a conclusion echoed by the Florida judge’s ruling.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did his British lawyers, while Mr. Steele declined to comment.Mr. Trump’s foray into the British courts comes as he is facing a raft of criminal and civil charges in the United States, on accusations ranging from election interference to inflating the value of his real estate assets — all of which he has denied. He has experienced a string of legal setbacks in courtrooms from Manhattan to South Florida.But in London, Mr. Trump is the plaintiff, and legal experts said his lawyers were trying to seize an advantage from Britain’s comparatively tight controls on personal data. Winning a claim that his data had been compromised, these lawyers said, would be easier than winning a claim of defamation.“It avoids the obvious hurdles of a U.K. defamation claim,” said Jay Joshi, a media lawyer with the London firm Taylor Hampton. These include the statute of limitations for defamation, normally a year, and the fact that the dossier was published in the United States, not Britain. “Trump is clearly seeking some form of vindication,” Mr. Joshi said.In 2020, Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology entrepreneur who was cited in the dossier, lost a defamation suit against Mr. Steele. But in another case that year, two Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, won damages of 18,000 pounds ($22,900) each from Mr. Steele’s firm after they argued that allegations about them in the dossier violated data-protection laws.The court ruled that Orbis had “failed to take reasonable steps to verify” claims that Mr. Fridman and Mr. Aven, who controlled Alfa Bank, had made illicit payments to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the judge dismissed several other claims.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are making a similar claim that Mr. Steele’s firm did not confirm the claims about him. Among other things, they said, Mr. Trump did not bribe Russian officials to advance his business interests.“The claimant did not engage in unorthodox behavior in Russia and did not act in a way that Russia authorities were provided with material to blackmail him,” the lawyers said. “The personal data is not accurate. Further, the Defendant failed to take all reasonable steps to insure the personal data was accurate.”Mr. Trump is being represented by Hugh Tomlinson, a leading London media lawyer who specializes in defamation, privacy and data protection. Among his former clients is King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, for whom Mr. Tomlinson argued successfully that a British tabloid should not be allowed to publish his private diaries, which contained astringent comments about the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.The Steele dossier grew out of an opposition research effort to dig up information about Mr. Trump, funded by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn hired Mr. Steele, an expert on Russia, to research Mr. Trump’s business dealings in the country.Mr. Steele shared some of the memos with the F.B.I. and journalists; they first came to light in January 2017 when Buzzfeed published 35 pages.His findings have been largely discredited by the F.B.I. and others who have investigated Mr. Trump’s relationship to Russia. Relying on anonymous sources, the dossier asserted that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that Russian officials had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.For much of his information, Mr. Steele relied on Igor Danchenko, a Russian researcher who told federal investigators that some of the claims were rumors that he had not been able to confirm. Mr. Danchenko was later indicted on a charge of misleading federal investigators, but he was ultimately acquitted.The F.B.I. concluded that one of the most explosive allegations in the dossier — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the 2016 campaign — was false.In his witness statement, Mr. Steele said he wrote the memos on a computer that was not connected to a network and was equipped with security that prohibited any third party from extracting data stored on it. He also said that Orbis no longer held any copy of the dossier on its systems by the end of the first week of January 2017.Mr. Steele has not denied sharing the dossier with journalists. But he rejected the contention that he has sought to promote its contents since then.“I declined to provide any media interviews for three and a half years after the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed, despite being asked multiple times by major international media organizations,” he testified. “If I had wanted to ‘promote’ the dossier as Mr. Trump suggests, I obviously would have taken up those media opportunities.” More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Trump-Russia Investigation

      by

      The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.A year into the Durham inquiry, Mr. Barr declared that the attempt “to get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016 “cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result.”But Robert Luskin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor who represented two witnesses Mr. Durham interviewed, said that he had a hard time squaring Mr. Durham’s prior reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter with his end-of-career conduct as Mr. Barr’s special counsel.“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”Attorney General William P. Barr took office in 2019 with suspicions about the origins of the Russia investigation.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAn Odd CoupleA month after Mr. Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.Mr. Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.That spring, Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.President Donald J. Trump openly suggested that Mr. Durham should charge his adversaries with crimes.Doug Mills/The New York Times‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’At the time Mr. Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.In May 2019, soon after giving Mr. Durham his assignment, Mr. Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul M. Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Mr. Barr demanded that the N.S.A. cooperate with the Durham inquiry.Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.Mr. Barr’s insistence about what he had surmised bewildered intelligence officials. But Mr. Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.)But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that the F.B.I.’s actions in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were politically motivated.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesThe week before Mr. Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Mr. Durham’s offices — nondescript suites on two floors of a building in northeast Washington — to go over it.Mr. Durham lobbied Mr. Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the F.B.I. to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Mr. Horowitz did not change his mind.That weekend, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.”But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation.By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.Mr. Barr later wrote that his relationship with Mr. Trump eroded because his “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election.”Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAn Awkward TipOn one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.But in October 2019, a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.By the spring and summer of 2020, with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Mr. Barr’s relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr wrote in his memoir.Mr. Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Mr. Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That proved too much for Mr. Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”Even so, in August, Mr. Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, along with top F.B.I. and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.Mr. Durham also developed an indirect method to impute political bias to law enforcement officials: comparing the Justice Department’s aggressive response to suspicions of links between Mr. Trump and Russia with its more cautious and skeptical reaction to various Clinton-related suspicions.He examined an investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s finances in which the F.B.I.’s repeated requests for a subpoena were denied. He also scrutinized how the F.B.I. gave Mrs. Clinton a “defensive briefing” about suspicions that a foreign government might be trying to influence her campaign through donations, but did not inform Mr. Trump about suspicions that Russia might be conspiring with people associated with his campaign.The Durham inquiry looked for evidence that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign had conspired to frame Donald J. Trump.Doug mills/The New York TimesDubious IntelligenceDuring the Russia investigation, the F.B.I. used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.In Mr. Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.The memos were part of a trove provided to the C.I.A. by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.Mr. Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Mrs. Clinton to attack Mr. Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump. And in doing so, Mr. Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Mr. Soros, has been vilified by the far right.In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Mr. Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta E. Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails from going too far.But Mr. Benardo and Ms. Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.In a statement provided to The Times by Mr. Soros’s foundation, Mr. Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”Nora R. Dannehy in 2009. A longtime aide to Mr. Durham, Ms. Dannehy resigned from his team in 2020 after disputes with him over prosecutorial ethics.Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesInternal StrifeAs the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Mr. Durham’s deputy, Ms. Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and F.B.I. agents about legal ethics.Ms. Dannehy had independent standing as a respected prosecutor. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned her to investigate whether to charge senior Bush administration officials with crimes related to a scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys; she decided in 2010 that no charges were warranted.Now, Ms. Dannehy complained to Mr. Durham about how Mr. Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. In April 2020, for example, he suggested to Fox News that officials could be prosecuted, saying that “the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Ms. Dannehy urged Mr. Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Mr. Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.The strains grew when Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to go after Mr. Benardo’s emails. Ms. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Mr. Durham had taken that step without telling her.By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness.On Sept. 10, 2020, Ms. Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Mr. Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.Cracks formed in Mr. Durham’s team as the scope of his investigation shifted. Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTwo people close to Mr. Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Ms. Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Mr. Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.Stymied by the decision not to issue an interim Durham report, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s national intelligence director, tried another way to inject some of the same information into the campaign.Over the objections of Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe declassified nearly 1,000 pages of intelligence material before the election for Mr. Durham to use. Notably, in that fight, Mr. Barr sided with Ms. Haspel on one matter that is said to be particularly sensitive and that remained classified, according to two people familiar with the dispute.Mr. Ratcliffe also disclosed in a letter to a senator that “Russian intelligence analysis” claimed that on July 26, 2016, Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal tying Mr. Trump to Russia.The letter acknowledged that officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But it did not mention that there were many reasons that suspicions about the Trump campaign were arising in that period — like the diplomat’s tip, Mr. Trump’s flattery of President Vladimir V. Putin, his hiring of advisers with links to Russia, his financial ties to Russia and his call for Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.The disclosure infuriated Dutch intelligence officials, who had provided the memos under strictest confidence.Mr. Durham accused Michael Sussmann of lying in a meeting with an F.B.I. official. He was acquitted.Samuel Corum for The New York Times‘Fanning the Flames’Late in the summer of 2021, Mr. Durham prepared to indict Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who had represented Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking of their emails. Two prosecutors on Mr. Durham’s team — Anthony Scarpelli and Neeraj N. Patel — objected, according to people familiar with the matter.Five years earlier, Mr. Sussmann had relayed a tip to the bureau about odd internet data that a group of data scientists contended could reflect hidden communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank of Russia. The F.B.I., which by then had already launched its Russia investigation, briefly looked at the allegation but dismissed it.Mr. Durham accused Mr. Sussmann of lying to an F.B.I. official by saying he was not conveying the tip for a client; the prosecutor maintained Mr. Sussmann was there in part for the Clinton campaign.Mr. Scarpelli and Mr. Patel argued to Mr. Durham that the evidence was too thin to charge Mr. Sussmann and that such a case would not normally be prosecuted, people familiar with the matter said. Given the intense scrutiny it would receive, they also warned that an acquittal would undermine public faith in their investigation and federal law enforcement.When Mr. Durham did not change course, Mr. Scarpelli quit in protest, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Patel left soon after to take a different job. Both declined to comment.The charge against Mr. Sussmann was narrow, but the Durham team used it to make public large amounts of information insinuating what Mr. Durham never charged: that Clinton campaign associates conspired to gin up an F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump based on a knowingly false allegation.Trial testimony, however, showed that while Mrs. Clinton and her campaign manager hoped Mr. Sussmann would persuade reporters to write articles about Alfa Bank, they did not want him to take the information to the F.B.I. And prosecutors presented no evidence that he or campaign officials had believed the data scientists’ complex theory was false.After Mr. Sussmann’s acquittal, Mr. Barr, by then out of office for more than a year, suggested that using the courts to advance a politically charged narrative was a goal in itself. Mr. Durham “accomplished something far more important” than a conviction, Mr. Barr told Fox News, asserting that the case had “crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.”And he predicted that a subsequent trial, concerning a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, would also “get the story out” and “further amplify these themes and the role the F.B.I. leadership played in this, which is increasingly looking fishy and inexplicable.”Mr. Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, ended in acquittal.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThat case involved Igor Danchenko, who had told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation. Mr. Durham charged him with lying about two sources. He was acquitted, too.The two failed cases are likely to be Mr. Durham’s last courtroom acts as a prosecutor. Bringing demonstrably weak cases stood in contrast to how he once talked about his prosecutorial philosophy.James Farmer, a retired prosecutor who worked with Mr. Durham on several major investigations, recalled him as a neutral actor who said that if there were nothing to charge, they would not strain to prosecute. “That’s what I heard, time and again,” Mr. Farmer said.Delivering the closing arguments in the Danchenko trial, Mr. Durham defended his investigation to the jury, denying that his appointment by Mr. Barr had been tainted by politics.He asserted that Mr. Mueller had concluded “there’s no evidence of collusion here or conspiracy” — a formulation that echoed Mr. Trump’s distortion of the Russia investigation’s complex findings — and added: “Is it the wrong question to ask, well, then how did this get started? Respectfully, that’s not the case.”The judge interrupted him: “You should finish up, Mr. Durham.”William K. Rashbaum More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Jury Begins Deliberating in Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims

      by

      The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Trump-era special prosecutor and a defense lawyer delivered starkly clashing views in closing arguments on Monday about the motives of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a key contributor to the so-called Steele dossier.A jury will now decide whether Mr. Danchenko is guilty of lying to the F.B.I. about one of his sources for information in the Steele dossier, a compendium of unsubstantiated assertions that Donald J. Trump and his 2016 campaign were colluding with Russia.The case is a major test of the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s inquiry into the nature of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. An earlier indictment brought by Mr. Durham ended with an acquittal in May, and the trial appears to be his last chance to obtain a conviction in a case he developed.In the closing arguments, a prosecutor working for Mr. Durham asserted that Mr. Danchenko had clearly lied to the F.B.I. and that his false assertions had a material effect. He pointed to part of the dossier that the F.B.I. cited to bolster applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.“This defendant’s lies caused intensive surveillance on a U.S. citizen,” said Michael Keilty, an assistant special counsel.In his own remarks, Mr. Durham sought to broaden the case, telling jurors that “the whole house of cards of the dossier crumbles” under the weight of the evidence.But the defense said the government’s own evidence showed that Mr. Danchenko did not lie. The lawyer, Stuart A. Sears, characterized Mr. Danchenko as a valuable and honest asset to the F.B.I. who unwittingly became embroiled in a politically charged investigation. Mr. Durham, he said, was intent on proving crimes “at any cost” and presumed Mr. Danchenko guilty from the start.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Judge Narrows Trial of Analyst Who Gathered Steele Dossier Claims About Trump

      by

      Matters deemed tangential to the charges of making false statements, including a notorious and uncorroborated rumor of a sex tape, will be excluded from the case.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, set off political reverberations last year when he unveiled a lengthy indictment of an analyst he accused of lying to the F.B.I. about sources for the so-called Steele dossier, a discredited compendium of political opposition research about purported ties between Donald J. Trump and Russia.But the trial of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, which opens on Tuesday with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Va., now appears likely to be shorter and less politically salient than the sprawling narrative in Mr. Durham’s indictment had suggested the proceeding would be.In an 18-page order last week, the judge overseeing the case, Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, excluded from the trial large amounts of information that Mr. Durham had wanted to showcase — including material that undercuts the credibility of the dossier’s notorious rumor that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.Certain facts Mr. Durham dug up related to that rumor “do not qualify as direct evidence as they are not ‘inextricably intertwined’ or ‘necessary to provide context’ to the relevant charge,” Judge Trenga wrote, adding that they “were substantially outweighed by the danger of confusion and unfair prejudice.”In that and other disputes over evidence, Judge Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, almost always sided with Mr. Danchenko’s defense lawyers. Mr. Durham, they said, had tried to inject irrelevant issues into the trial in “an unnecessary and impermissible attempt to make this case about more than it is.”Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the larger significance of the trial, which is likely to be Mr. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has used to hear evidence has expired, suggesting he will bring no further indictments.Mr. Durham is also writing a report to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who succeeded the Trump administration official who appointed him as special counsel, William P. Barr.Judge Trenga’s ruling has pared down the significance of the trial, which is likely to be John H. Durham’s final courtroom act before he retires as a longtime prosecutor.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesThe dossier, which is at the heart of the Danchenko trial, attracted significant public attention when BuzzFeed published it in January 2017. Mr. Trump and his supporters frequently try to conflate it with the official Russia inquiry or falsely claim that it was the basis for the F.B.I.’s investigation.But the F.B.I. did not open the investigation based on the dossier, and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence. The F.B.I. did cite some claims from the dossier in applying for court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsElection Fraud Claims: A new report says that major social media companies continue to fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.Russian Falsehoods: Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming the West for disrupting the global food supply have bled into right-wing chat rooms and mainstream conservative news media in the United States.Media Literacy Efforts: As young people spend more time online, educators are increasingly trying to offer students tools and strategies to protect themselves from false narratives.Global Threat: New research shows that nearly three-quarters of respondents across 19 countries with advanced economies are very concerned about false information online.The dossier grew out of opposition research indirectly funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with the research firm Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to a company run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.Mr. Steele in turn subcontracted to Mr. Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst living in the United States, who canvassed people he knew, including in Europe and Russia. Mr. Danchenko verbally relayed what the analyst later called “raw intelligence” — essentially uncorroborated gossip — to Mr. Steele, who drafted the dossier.A bureau counterintelligence analyst determined Mr. Danchenko’s identity and the F.B.I. first spoke to him in early 2017, during which he said he had not seen the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. Its tenor was more conclusive than was justified, he said, and he portrayed the blackmail tape story as mere rumor and speculation.Mr. Danchenko talked to the F.B.I. for hours about what he had gathered, and court filings by Mr. Durham disclosed that the bureau formally deemed him a confidential human source.An inspector general report revealed in late 2019 that Mr. Danchenko’s interview had raised doubts about the credibility of the dossier and criticized the bureau for failing to tell that to a court in wiretap renewal applications that continued to cite it. The report essentially portrayed Mr. Danchenko, whom it did not name, as a truth-teller, and the F.B.I. as deceptive.But after further investigation, Mr. Durham accused Mr. Danchenko of deceiving the F.B.I. — including by concealing that a public relations executive with ties to Democrats, Charles Dolan, had been his source for a minor claim involving office politics in the Trump campaign. That assertion made its way into the dossier.At the trial, Mr. Danchenko’s defense will apparently be that the F.B.I. asked him whether he had ever “talked” to Mr. Dolan about information in the dossier and that his somewhat equivocal denial was true: They had instead communicated by writing about that topic.Mr. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the F.B.I.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDefense lawyers had asked Judge Trenga to throw out the charge, arguing that the particular statute Mr. Danchenko had been charged with covers only affirmative misstatements, not misleading omissions. The judge has characterized that issue as a close call but let it go forward, while suggesting he could revisit the question later.Mr. Durham had also wanted to present striking but inconclusive evidence: In the summer of 2016, when Mr. Danchenko went to Moscow to gather rumors like the one about a purported sex tape, Mr. Dolan was staying at the hotel where the tape had supposedly been filmed three years earlier — and toured the suite where Mr. Trump had stayed.But Mr. Dolan told Mr. Durham’s team that he had never heard the tape rumor until BuzzFeed published the dossier, and Mr. Durham did not claim that Mr. Dolan was a source of the rumor. The judge excluded that information from the trial as irrelevant to the false statements Mr. Danchenko is charged with making.Mr. Durham also brought four false-statement charges against Mr. Danchenko related to accusations that he lied to the F.B.I. about a person he said had called and provided information without identifying himself.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. he believed the caller had probably been Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, but Mr. Durham contends that is a lie and Mr. Danchenko never believed that.Like Mr. Steele, Mr. Millian is abroad; he refused to come to the United States to be a witness at the trial. The judge has also ruled inadmissible two emails Mr. Millian apparently wrote about Mr. Danchenko in 2020 denying that he talked to Mr. Danchenko.The “emails lack the necessary ‘guarantees of trustworthiness’ as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts,” the judge wrote.After Mr. Durham was assigned to investigate the Russia investigation in the spring of 2019, Mr. Trump and his supporters stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against him and charge high-level F.B.I. and intelligence officials with crimes.But instead, Mr. Durham developed two cases on narrow charges of false statements involving outside efforts to uncover links between Mr. Trump and Russia. One was against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with Democratic ties who was acquitted of lying to the F.B.I. when he shared a tip about possible connections between Mr. Trump and Russia. Another was against Mr. Danchenko.Mr. Durham filled court filings with copious amounts of information seemingly extraneous to the charges, while insinuating that Democrats had conspired to frame Mr. Trump for colluding with Russia.While that was not the theoretical conspiracy Mr. Trump and his supporters at outlets like Fox News had originally focused on, Mr. Durham’s filings provided fodder for them to stoke grievances about the Russia investigation. But judges in both cases have proved skeptical about putting much of that material before a jury.In both instances, however, Mr. Durham’s earlier filings had already made that information public.Mr. Danchenko was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation more than a decade ago, after the F.B.I. received a tip that he had made a remark that someone interpreted as an offer to buy classified information. He had also had contact with someone at the Russian embassy believed to be an intelligence officer. The bureau closed the case in 2011 without charging him.Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by bringing to light evidence that President Vladimir V. Putin likely plagiarized parts of his dissertation — has denied being a Russian agent and said he has no memory of the purported remark. For now, the judge has barred Mr. Durham’s team from introducing details about that inquiry, although prosecutors can tell the jury that there had been one.In an interview last month with the conservative Washington Examiner, Mr. Barr suggested that despite the special counsel’s limited achievements in the courtroom, the investigation was a success from another point of view.“I think Durham got out a lot of important facts that fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” Mr. Barr said, adding that he expected “the Danchenko trial will also allow for a lot of this story to be told, whether or not he’s ultimately convicted.” More

    • 88 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Discredited Steele Dossier Doesn't Undercut Russia Inquiry

      by

      Donald J. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.” That is not what the facts indicate.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a “hoax.”But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts.What was the Steele dossier?It was a series of memos about purported Trump-Russia links written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, during the 2016 campaign.It cited unnamed sources who claimed there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes. In addition to giving his memos to his client, Mr. Steele gave some to the F.B.I. and reporters. Buzzfeed published 35 pages in January 2017.Many things that were not immediately apparent about the dossier have since become clearer. It grew out of a political opposition research effort to dig up information about Mr. Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with a research firm called Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele in turn hired Igor Danchenko, the recently indicted researcher, to canvass for information from people he knew, including in Europe and Russia.What was the Russia investigation?It was a counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into the Russian operation to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking and anonymously dumping Democratic emails and by spreading propaganda using fake accounts on American social media platforms. The scrutiny of Russia’s activities included examining the nature of links between Trump campaign associates and Russians to see if there was any coordination.The F.B.I. launched the investigation in July 2016, and a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, eventually took over. His March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and established that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” He did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy.Was the dossier a reliable source of information?No. It has become clear over time that its sourcing was thin and sketchy.No corroborating evidence has emerged in intervening years to support many of the specific claims in the dossier, and government investigators determined that one key allegation — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.When the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017, he told the bureau that he thought the tenor of the dossier was more conclusive than was justified; for example, Mr. Danchenko portrayed the blackmail tape story as rumors and speculation that he was not able to confirm. He also said a key source had called him without identifying himself, and that he had guessed at the source’s identity. The indictment accuses Mr. Danchenko of lying about that call and of concealing that a Democratic Party-linked public relations executive was his source for a claim about Trump campaign office politics.Did the F.B.I. open the investigation because of the dossier?No. Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated that the F.B.I. based the Russia investigation on the dossier. But when counterintelligence agents launched the effort on July 30, 2016, they did not yet know about the dossier. An inspector general report established that Mr. Steele’s reports reached that counterintelligence team on Sept. 19, 2016.The basis for the investigation was instead that WikiLeaks had disrupted the Democratic National Convention by releasing Democratic emails believed to have been stolen by Russian hackers, and that an Australian diplomat said a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser had bragged to him about apparent outreach from Russia involving an offer to help the campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Mrs. Clinton.Did the F.B.I. take any investigative step based on the dossier?Yes. The F.B.I. took the dossier seriously based on Mr. Steele’s reputation, and used some of it — without independent verification — for a narrow purpose that led to a dead end and became a political debacle. It included several claims from Mr. Steele’s memos in applications to wiretap Carter A. Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser with ties to Russia. In 2019, the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for numerous flaws in those wiretap applications.While the dossier-tainted wiretap of Mr. Page has received significant attention, it was a small part of the overall investigation, which issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communications records, made 13 requests to foreign governments under mutual legal assistance treaties, and interviewed about 500 witnesses. Mr. Page was not charged with a crime, and only a handful of the 448 pages in the Mueller report focus on him.Did investigators rely on the dossier for their findings?No. The Mueller report does not present claims from the dossier as evidence, and many of the issues focused on by investigators did not come up in the dossier.The dossier makes no mention, for example, of a July 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and senior campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr., who eagerly accepted the request for a meeting after being told they were bringing dirt on Mrs. Clinton.Nor does the dossier mention that in August 2016, Konstantin V. Kilimnik — described in the 2019 Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” and in a partly declassified, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020 as a “Russian intelligence officer” with possible ties to Russia’s election interference operations — flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.Investigators established that the two had discussed whether Mr. Trump, if elected, would bless a peace plan effectively allowing Russia to control eastern Ukraine, and that Mr. Manafort had shared internal polling data and campaign strategy information with Mr. Kilimnik, which the Treasury Department later said he passed on to a Russian spy agency. (The government has not declassified evidence for its escalating accusations about Mr. Kilimnik.)The Senate report said Mr. Manafort’s “willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services” represented a “grave counterintelligence threat.”Did Mueller rely on the dossier for any criminal charges?No. The special counsel investigation led to indictments of 34 people and three companies. Many of those indicted — like Mr. Kilimnik — reside abroad and have not faced trial. Mr. Mueller obtained nine guilty pleas or jury convictions, including half a dozen close Trump associates. None of those indictments cited the dossier as evidence.The fact that Mr. Mueller did not obtain sufficient evidence to charge Trump associates with conspiracy is subject to disputed interpretations that overlap with the debate over the dossier’s significance. Trump supporters frame the lack of conspiracy charges as proof there was no collusion. By combining this with the false premise that there would not have been any Russia investigation without the Steele dossier, they portray Mr. Trump as a victim of a hoax.Beyond pointing out that there is a range of cooperation and coordination that falls short of the legal definition of “conspiracy,” Trump skeptics argue that Mr. Mueller never definitively got to the bottom of what happened in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the investigation — like dangling a pardon before Mr. Manafort to keep him from cooperating.What was the main impact of the dossier?Beyond its narrow role in facilitating the F.B.I.’s wiretap of Mr. Page, the dossier’s publication had the broader consequence of amplifying an atmosphere of suspicion about Mr. Trump.Still, the dossier did not create this atmosphere of suspicion. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Russia had been a topic of significant discussion dating back to the campaign, including before the first report that Russia had hacked Democrats and before Mr. Steele drafted his reports and gave some to reporters.Among the reasons: Mr. Trump had said flattering things about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, kept bringing on advisers with ties to Russia, had financial ties to Russia, publicly encouraged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton, and at his nominating convention, the party dropped a plank that called for arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels. In March 2017, the F.B.I. publicly acknowledged that it was investigating links between Russia and Trump campaign associates. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      What the Steele Dossier Reveals About the FBI

      by

      This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

      by

      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Subpoenaing the Brookings Institution, Durham Focuses on Trump-Russia Dossier

      by

      The special counsel scrutinizing the Russia inquiry, a Trump-era leftover, appears to be retreading ground that an inspector general explored in 2019.WASHINGTON — Exiled from Twitter, former President Donald J. Trump issued a sarcastic statement recently inquiring about the ongoing public silence from John H. Durham, the special counsel who has been investigating the Trump-Russia inquiry since May 2019.“Where’s Durham?” said Mr. Trump, who repeatedly predicted before last year’s election that Mr. Durham’s investigation would prove a deep-state conspiracy against him. “Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”Mr. Durham ignored the complaint publicly, and the scope of his inquiry remains opaque. But one aspect has come into focus recently, according to people familiar with the investigation: Mr. Durham has keyed in on the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious dossier of political opposition research both before and after the bureau started using it to obtain court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser in 2016 and 2017 and questioned witnesses who may have insight into the matter.In particular, Mr. Durham has obtained documents from the Brookings Institution related to Igor Danchenko, a Russia researcher who worked there a decade ago and later helped gather rumors about Mr. Trump and Russia for that research, known as the Steele dossier, according to people familiar with the request.By asking about the dossier, Mr. Durham has come to focus at least in part on re-scrutinizing an aspect of the investigation that was already exposed as problematic by a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report and led to reforms by the F.B.I. and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.Asked whether the special counsel had briefed his new supervisor — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — a Justice Department spokesman would only point to a statement by Mr. Garland as a nominee. “If confirmed,” he said, “one of the first things I am going to do is speak with Mr. Durham and learn the status of his investigation.”In February, several weeks before the Senate confirmed Mr. Garland, Mr. Durham obtained old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank, using a subpoena. Mr. Danchenko had worked there from 2005 until 2010.Mr. Danchenko traveled to Russia in 2016 and gathered rumors about Mr. Trump and his associates on behalf of Christopher Steele, who produced the dossier as a subcontractor for an investigative firm being indirectly paid by Democrats to look into any Trump-Russia ties.Michael Cavadel, the general counsel of Brookings, confirmed the subpoena for records and other materials about Mr. Danchenko, saying that it was received on Dec. 31 and that the think tank had taken until February to gather the files and turn them over to Mr. Durham’s team in part because its office is closed during the pandemic.“Consistent with its practices in such matters, Brookings provided the responsive documents, none of which contained information associated with the reports known as the Steele dossier,” Mr. Cavadel said.Last September, the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, made public that from 2009 to 2011 Mr. Danchenko had been the subject of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation assessing his contacts with several suspected Russian intelligence officials, including at the Russian Embassy.(Skeptics of the Steele dossier have raised the prospect that Russian intelligence may have used Mr. Danchenko or his sources to seed it with disinformation, in order to further sow chaos. Mr. Danchenko was never charged and has denied ever being a Russian agent. He has also noted that during his time at Brookings he put forward analysis embarrassing to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: evidence that Mr. Putin plagiarized parts of his dissertation.)Igor Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution from 2005 to 2010.Jonah M. Kessel/The New York TimesMr. Durham has also asked questions that suggested a focus on skepticism about how the F.B.I. approached issues that might have undermined the dossier’s credibility as a basis for wiretap applications, people familiar with the inquiry said.For example, Mr. Durham’s team is said to have asked why the F.B.I., after identifying Mr. Danchenko as a major source for the dossier and interviewing him in early 2017, did not tell the surveillance court that he had once been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.Mr. Durham is also said to be interested in a meeting between the F.B.I. and Mr. Steele in Rome in early October 2016, shortly before the bureau submitted the first wiretap application that used information from his dossier.The previous month, Yahoo News had published an article that contained information that overlapped with claims in the dossier, and the F.B.I. later learned that Mr. Steele had been a source for it, prompting the bureau to sever its relationship with him. At the time, as the bureau told the court in its wiretap application, it assumed the source had been someone else who had received a copy of the dossier.Mr. Durham is said to have asked why F.B.I. officials at that October meeting apparently did not ask Mr. Steele whether he was the article’s source — before using his information to apply for permission to wiretap the former Trump adviser, Carter Page.The focus raised the possibility that Mr. Durham has been exploring whether F.B.I. officials knowingly misled the surveillance court. But if Mr. Durham has found credible evidence of such a crime — as opposed to sloppy investigative work — he has yet to file any such charges.Mr. Durham interviewed the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan in August, but told him he was not the target of any criminal inquiry. But he has yet to interview former F.B.I. officials who held senior roles in 2016 and have been demonized by Trump supporters, including the former director James B. Comey; his former deputy Andrew G. McCabe; and a former senior counterintelligence agent, Peter Strzok, according to people familiar with the matter.To the extent any eventual Durham report focuses on criticizing the F.B.I.’s handling of issues related to the Steele dossier, it would risk largely retreading ground already covered by the 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz.Mr. Horowitz has already brought to light the fact that the F.B.I. botched its wiretap applications in numerous ways, including uncovering numerous material facts that law enforcement officials failed to tell the court and that might have undermined their case for receiving wiretap authorization or renewals — including about the dossier.Mr. Horowitz’s report also already unearthed the fact that Mr. Danchenko had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation when he worked at Brookings, in a footnote that was initially classified before Mr. Barr decided to make it public.The report also already focused criticism on the F.B.I.’s failure to ask Mr. Steele in October 2016 whether he played a role in the Yahoo News article.And the misconduct by the only person Mr. Durham has charged to date — Kevin Clinesmith, a former F.B.I. lawyer who altered an email shown to a colleague during preparations to seek a renewal of the wiretap, preventing another problem from coming to light internally — was uncovered by Mr. Horowitz’s investigation. (Mr. Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to falsifying the email but insisted that he did not deliberately mislead his colleague, was sentenced to probation.)Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to hunt for any potential wrongdoing by the Trump-Russia investigators in spring 2019, at a time when Mr. Trump and his supporters were pushing the notion that the inquiry had been a “deep state” plot against him. While Mr. Durham’s work has been opaque, accounts by people familiar with his investigation have made clear that he has pursued various Trumpian conspiracy theories and grievances.In seeking to discredit the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump and his allies have frequently conflated it with the flawed Steele dossier. In fact, the Page wiretaps were a minor part of the overall effort, and Mr. Horowitz’s report showed that it played no role in the F.B.I. decision to open the counterintelligence investigation in July 2016.While uncovering numerous ways the F.B.I. had botched those wiretap applications, Mr. Horowitz’s report also concluded that it had lawfully opened the overall investigation on an adequate basis. When the inspector general delivered the report, Mr. Durham intervened with an unusual public statement saying he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz that the investigation’s opening was properly predicated.Mr. Durham provided no details, but Mr. Horowitz later told Congress that Mr. Durham had told him he thought that the F.B.I. should have opened the inquiry as a “preliminary” investigation rather than going straight to a “full” one. More