While prosecutors have produced evidence that the two had email exchanges about topics in the dossier, there’s no evidence that they talked orally about those topics. They say his answers to the FBI were all technically true.įor instance, an FBI agent asked Danchenko whether he ever “talked” with Dolan about the information that showed up in the dossier. The indictment says the FBI could have better judged the veracity of the Steele dossier had it known that a Democratic operative was the source of much of its information.ĭanchenko’s lawyers say the prosecution “is a case of extraordinary government overreach.” They note that Danchenko agreed to multiple voluntary FBI interviews throughout 2017.
They argue Danchenko knew that Millian wasn’t a source of any anonymous phone call. Prosecutors also say Danchenko lied when he said he received information from an anonymous phone call that he believed was placed by a man named named Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Specifically, they say he denied that he relied on a Democratic operative, Charles Dolan, a public relations executive who volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s presidential 2016 campaign. Prosecutors say Danchenko lied when the FBI asked him about how he obtained the information he gave to Steele. He is charged with lying to agents about his information sources, with prosecutors accusing Danchenko of misleading the FBI in an effort to make his own contributions seem more credible. The compilation of research files, which included salacious rumors and unproven assertions, came to be familiarly known as the “Steele dossier.” Though the dossier did not help launch the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department did rely on it when it applied for and received warrants to monitor the communications of a former Trump campaign adviser.Īs part of its efforts to verify information in the dossier, the FBI interviewed Danchenko in 2017. WHO IS DANCHENKO AND WHAT IS HE ACCUSED OF?ĭanchenko, a Russian analyst, was a source of information for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to research ties between Russia and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Here’s some background on what the case is about.
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