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Counsel Needs To Fight…==
Part 2 of 3
The remaining four counts of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s alleged lies about his supposed conversation with the then-President of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. According to the indictment, Danchenko told FBI agents on multiple occasions—thus the four counts—that he believed Millian had provided him information during an anonymous phone call, including the “intel,” later included in the Steele dossier, that there was “a well-developed ‘conspiracy of cooperation’ between the Trump Campaign and Russian officials.”
But Danchenko never spoke with Millian and Millian was not a source for Danchenko nor the Steele dossier, as Millian has long maintained. Millian will not comment further, telling The Federalist that Durham’s team requested he “not talk to the press about details of the investigation.”
Get Those Subpoenas Enforced
Some of those details will likely be made public, however, when pre-trial filings begin to hit the docket in the case against Danchenko. With the October 11, 2022, trial date only about four months away, one could anticipate various filings to flow in soon. But following the court’s ruling in United States v. Sussmann that the special counsel waited too long to challenge documents withheld from the grand jury based on the Clinton campaign’s assertion of attorney-client privilege, Durham’s team should move next week to enforce any subpoenas.
In the Sussmann case, on April 6, 2022, the special counsel filed a Motion to Compel documents withheld from the grand jury to be produced to the court in camera. On May 4, 2022, presiding judge Christopher Cooper ordered Fusion GPS to provide the court 38 documents sought by the special counsel’s office to allow the court to determine whether they were protected by attorney-client privilege. Then, on May 12, 2022, the court ruled that emails between Fusion GPS and the press “as part of an affirmative media relations effort by the Clinton Campaign” were not privileged and must be provided to prosecutors.
The court, however, further ruled that because the special counsel waited “until April 6, 2022, just over a month before trial was set to begin,” to challenge the privilege, “allowing the Special Counsel to use these documents at trial would prejudice Mr. Sussmann’s defense.” Accordingly, while the special counsel’s office obtained access to the documents, they could not use those documents during the prosecution of Sussmann.
To ensure prosecutors both have access to all material documents and the ability to use any relevant documents during the Danchenko trial, the special counsel’s office should move quickly to obtain any material previously withheld by Fusion GPS under the auspices of attorney-client privilege. In total, as the court explained in the Sussmann case, Fusion GPS withheld “approximately 1500 documents” from the grand jury, but the judge only considered privilege for 38 documents prosecutors sought access to in its case against the former Clinton campaign manager.
What’s Inside Those Documents
The details contained in Danchenko’s indictment, coupled with the content of various emails between Fusion GPS and reporters, suggest some of the 1,500 documents withheld will concern Danchenko’s supposed intel, even though Danchenko was one step removed from Fusion GPS, having been brought into the Russia collusion smear project by Steele.
The indictment, for instance, notes that on “July 28, 2016, Danchenko sent a message to an acquaintance” stating, “Thanks to my reporting in the past 36 hours, Steele and Steele’s assistant are flying in tomorrow for a few days so I might be busy.” That same day the FBI’s New York Field Office received two of Steele’s election reports.
July 28, 2016, is also the date the FBI received the “tip” from the Australian diplomat that George Papadopoulos “had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist . . . with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to [Hillary] Clinton.” That “tip” purportedly formed the basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/03/why-the-special-counsel-needs-to-fight-for-more-spygate-documents-stat/