J.E. Dyer
The Optimistic Conservative, Sept. 13, 2022
“I don’t find it credible that Dolan had a paper trail a mile long in the Steele dossier aspect of Russiagate, and yet somehow the FBI neglected to discover the paper trail and bring Dolan in for a fuller accounting.”
On 2 September 2022, Special Counsel John Durham entered a motion under seal in the federal case against Igor Danchenko – source for the Steele dossier – for making false statements to the FBI.
The motion, regarding admissibility of evidence, was filed under seal because it contained classified information. The motion was unsealed 13 September with redactions in the Exhibits. Margot Cleveland previewed earlier at The Federalist the presumption that if the motion were unsealed, we’d be able to discern the direction Durham is going to take the case.
In her view, especially based on Danchenko’s response to the new Durham filing, Durham will have to expose the Deep State’s operations if he wants to keep the case going. Otherwise, the Danchenko defense will argue, with probable success, that his false statements were immaterial, because they didn’t affect the FBI’s, or DOJ’s or Robert Mueller’s, follow-on choices about investigation of the original matter.
The Durham motion goes directly to that point, making a case that Danchenko’s false statements indeed affected the course of the investigation. In building that case, Durham frames our first ping.
Ping One: Dolan, Dolan, Dolan!
The main thrust of Durham’s case in this regard is that Danchenko lied systematically about his contacts with Charles Dolan, who figures as PR-Executive 1 in the original Danchenko indictment. If Danchenko had been more truthful about his contacts with Dolan and the content of their discussions, the FBI – says Durham – would have recognized a need to pursue more information from Dolan.
See, for example, this passage on p. 13 regarding Dolan’s involvement in Danchenko’s sashay through the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in June 2016: “Had the FBI known that Dolan was a fact witness in this respect, it is more likely that they would have interviewed Dolan about the Ritz-Carlton Allegations, given his proximity to the defendant and the hotel staff at the time the information was allegedly collected.” …. source
