Igor Danchenko is seeking to stop special counsel John Durham from raising alleged links he has to the Russian government.
Durham charged Danchenko last year for five alleged false statements to the FBI, including saying the Russia-born lawyer anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to longtime Hillary Clinton ally Charles Dolan. The special counsel team said Dolan would testify in court that he suspected Danchenko was tied to Russian intelligence.
Danchenko’s lawyers argued Monday that the judge should “preclude evidence, testimony, or argument that Charles Dolan jokingly and baselessly speculated that Igor Danchenko may have been associated with the Russian government.”
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Durham prosecutor Michael Keilty said, “Mr. Dolan will testify he had suspicions about Mr. Danchenko being tied to Russian intelligence” during an Alexandria courtroom hearing last Thursday.
Durham has used court filings to point to comments made by Dolan in 2016 and 2017 suggesting he suspected Danchenko was connected to Russian intelligence.
Dolan sent an email in June 2016 to a U.S.-based acquaintance describing the Steele source as “too young for KGB” but that “I think he worked for FSB.” The FSB is Russia’s principal successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB. Dolan added that “when I first met him he knew more about me than I did” and ended with a winking emoji.
“Undermining any credible claim of reliability and admissibility, the email on its face suggests that Mr. Dolan was joking when he wrote it because he included a winking smile emoticon at the conclusion,” Danchenko’s lawyers said Monday.
Dolan also informed a U.S.-based acquaintance in January 2017, just three days after BuzzFeed published the dossier, that Dolan knew “the Russian agent who made the report (he used to work for me).”
Danchenko’s lawyers cited notes from a purported September 2021 interview the FBI had with Dolan, in which the bureau said Dolan explained this message by saying that “he was just having some fun with an old friend, but there was some truth there, however [he] could not be 100% sure.”
Danchenko’s lawyers also contended that, in his initial August 2021 interview with Durham’s team, Dolan “stated that he never had a feeling that Danchenko was a Russian intelligence officer. [He] stated, he ‘had no reason to believe it,’ and it ‘never crossed my mind.’”
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The defense team argued, “Mr. Dolan’s joking conclusion should be seen for what it is; a prejudicial conclusion based on Mr. Danchenko’s status as an ethnic Russian national.”
Danchenko’s trial is set to get underway next week.
