Danchenko Was An FBI Informant
But There's More
John Durham’s latest filing in the false statements prosecution of Igor Danchenko contained the revelation that Danchenko had, for about 3-1/2 years, been a paid FBI informant. What makes this revelation so interesting is that the years in question ran from March, 2017, to October 20, 2020. That means he was an informant all through the Mueller Witchhunt but, more remarkably, even after Barr shut Mueller down in early 2019.
March, 2017, was two months after Danchenko told the FBI that any “information” attributed to him in the Steele Dossier was, at best, idle speculation. Now, the fact that any given person may have a poor track record doesn’t necessarily disqualify that person from being an informant—that depends on the circumstances. For example, if a liar’s information can be confirmed by later investigation, the value of the liar’s assistance will have been no less valuable than if it had been received from an upstanding citizen. Of course, there are problems, and great prudence in handling such a person is required. To use such a person as an informant in a matter—the Russia Hoax—in which he has already been shown to have been unreliable would tend to stretch prudence.
Not surprisingly, Danchenko’s team hopes to use his use as an informant to bolster his defense. On p. 33 Durham notes:
the Government expects the defense to introduce evidence of FBI investigations into other individuals who the Government anticipates will feature prominently at trial.
The clear inference is that the defense intends to maintain that Danchenko was providing information to the FBI regarding those “other individuals” that the FBI was investigating. Presumably the defense will also produce testimony from FBI personnel to the effect that they found Danchenko to be reliable. The jury would then be asked to accept that any inaccuracies in the statements to the FBI for which Danchenko is being prosecuted were unintentional and not in keeping with his otherwise reliable relationship with the FBI. It’s not a bad tactic for the defense.
On the other hand, these revelations have piqued interest in the broader Russia Hoax case. For example, Techno Fog, at the very end of an enlightening discussion of Durham’s filing (Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant) asks the obvious question: Who might those “other individuals” be? And he provides a plausible answer:
Millian and Dolan and Steele, for starters.
After all, during that period the FBI was supposedly trying to figure out whether Steele’s Dossier had any truth to it at all. So all of that looks like Danchenko’s relationship with the FBI might have been on the up and up. But …
There is a circumstance that raises suspicions that something else was going on. John Durham was appointed Special Counsel on October 19, 2020. It was the very next day that Danchenko was terminated as an FBI informant. People with suspicious minds are suggesting that maybe Danchenko wasn’t really providing much in the way of useful information at all, during most if not all of the period that he was an informant. If any person knows the truth of that one would suppose that person would be John Durham. On the face of it, however, it certainly appears difficult to believe that if Danchenko was actually assisting the FBI in for-real investigations of persons involved in the Russia Hoax, that assistance—as an informant—ended abruptly as soon as Durham became Special Counsel. That would have been exactly the point in time that you would expect things to heat up, and for Danchenko’s assistance to become even more important.
Not to put too fine a point on it, there are those who believe that the FBI maintained Danchenko as an informant for all those years in order, in effect, to hide him from the official view of investigators—whether in the media, in Congress, or internal DoJ investigators. As long as Danchenko was an informant the FBI would be able to keep his true identity concealed if references to him appeared in documents that were made public or even for the purposes of internal inquiries—such as by OIG. Even information that might point toward him could be redacted. Of course, all of that could also have been one of those “hiding in plain sight” sorts of things. The secret that everybody knows, so it isn’t much of a secret—but it’s convenient to pretend.
SWC summarizes this point of view nicely—and who am I to gainsay him?
All of which raises the question that has been knocked around before. What kind of prosecution is this? Why is Durham bringing cases that he seems destined to lose—I speak of this as a practical matter. Is he acting on strict principle, or does he also have a bigger picture in mind? Is he more concerned with getting information out into the public domain than with winning tough cases? Also—and I won’t claim to know the ins and outs of this—does this extend the statute of limitations, and if so, who would be affected? What will happen if the GOP takes control of one or both houses of Congress, and all this information that Durham is exposing is just sitting out there? If the GOP does gain control, it will have been with a lot of help from Trump’s campaigning. Trump and his supporters will be clamoring for action.
Could one say that making Danchenko (known to the FBI to be a liar) a CHS was an "overt act in furtherance of an ongoing criminal conspiracy?"
:-)
Is it just me or does SWC seem to have just gotten a little religion vis a vis the behavior/nature of today's FBI? I'm not suggesting he's been some sort of shameless shill, just that he seems to be giving much less benefit of the doubt to the motives of the FBI bigwigs in these comments. And this strikes me as no small change in his usual take on things.
I'm wrong more than often enough that I'm wide open to having it explained to me why I'm wrong again here.