Turley shocked by Danchenko trial: 'Breathtaking' how much Mueller didn't know or chose not to report

Special counsel John Durham rested his case after four days of the Igor Danchenko trial. Before committing the case to the jury for deliberation, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga dismissed one of the five criminal charges that were lodged against the Russian analyst.

Danchenko is the guy who put ‘Russia’ in ‘Trump/Russia collusion.’ Paid over $200k by the FBI between 2017 and 2020, he was the primary Russian source for the Steele dossier, which was used to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, so that Clinton and the DNC could spy on the Trump campaign.

Speaking with Fox News’s Martha MacCallum, Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said that he found the payments by the FBI to Danchenko to be “very alarming.”

Durham, a former Connecticut federal prosecutor, reviewed Danchenko’s June 2017 interview with the FBI relating to the sources he used to provide information to the firm that assembled the dossier, and he charged the Russian last year.

The indictment included the charge that Danchenko “stated falsely that he had never communicated with” Democratic operative Charles Dolan about allegations in the dossier, while “in truth and in fact, and as Danchenko well knew, Danchenko sourced one or more specific allegations” in the dossier anonymously to Dolan.

The judge dropped that particular charge, saying it was too weak to send to the jury.

Some characterized the dropped charge as a “stumble” for Durham, but Turley thought it could potentially strengthen the prosecution’s case and could help avoid a hung jury.

“That was the weakest of the five counts – I was surprised it was included,” said Turley. “In some ways, it strengthened the prosecution’s case not to have that count. I felt it was really something that was begging for a hung jury or an acquittal. So they’ll go forward on the stronger, more direct counts.”

Danchenko’s attorneys suggested they wouldn’t put forth a defense, which Turley thought was likely to be more strategy than confidence.

“Sometimes the defense doesn’t really have much to put on while risking a possible impeachment or cross-examination that could go wrong.” He said that the defense might have assessed that they wouldn’t “gain that much by presenting their own witnesses. In this case, the defense did robust cross-examination, so I think they’re going to play this conservatively and not present a case which can present targets for the prosecution.”

MacCallum brought up Kim Strassel’s Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which she posited that this trial is really a trial of the FBI.

“Partisanship and incompetence are not crimes. So the FBI isn’t in the dock. But Mr. Durham is making the case for the public and it is as ugly as they come,” said Strassel, who also quoted Andrew McCarthy.

“Yes, Igor Danchenko is on trial, but the spotlight ought to be on the FBI and what Durham’s final report will have to say about the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency,” said McCarthy.

MacCallum continued, “What we learned is that the sources didn’t speak to the people that they said gave them this information and dirt on Donald Trump. Then they turned it in to get a FISA warrant so that they could get a hook in to the Trump team through Carter Page, who says even though he was an informant at one point, he was never paid a dime. What do you think?

Turley agreed with these assessments, saying, “It is really breathtaking how much either Special Counsel Mueller did not know or chose not to put it into his report.”

“We have learned a lot from this special counsel, including how the Hillary Clinton campaign funded the Steele dossier, denied they were funding it – they hid that funding through their attorney, Marc Elias – and they ultimately got false statements into the media [and] put forward false claims into the FBI,” Turley added.

“On the FBI side, it was really breathtaking. It had the feel of a canned hunt. I mean, they were saying, look, we’ll give you $1,000,000 if you can bag Trump, and then they went ahead and hired the same person … they kept as an informant, the person used in the Steele dossier. And so this cross-pollination raises additional questions. This is all very, very disturbing.”

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