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Judge Sanctions Alina Habba for Misrepresenting Igor Danchenko Indictment

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There are a number of reasons why Judge Donald Middlebrook sanctioned Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin for the frivolous claims they made against Chuck Dolan in the omnibus lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and a bunch of other people.

In reverse order, Middlebrook found that the lawsuit was filed for improper purpose: to advance a political grievance.

Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law. These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.

[snip]

The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory.

He ruled that it’s not RICO, it’s never RICO (or any of the other conspiracies Habba alleged, either).

In the RICO count of the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff realleged the previous 619 paragraphs, and it was a mystery who he intended to sue. In the caption to Count II, he named 22 defendants but in the prayer for relief for that count 28 were named. Added were HF ACC, Inc., the DNC Services Corporations, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe. (Am. Compl. ¶ 633). Whoever he intended to sue, Plaintiff alleged that each of them “knew about and agreed to facilitate the Enterprise’s scheme to harm the Plaintiff’s political career, tarnish his electability, and undermine his ability to effectively govern as the President of the United States . . . . ” (Am. Compl. ¶ 627).

The RICO conspiracy claims were entirely conclusory. Moreover, there is no standing to bring a RICO conspiracy claim unless injury resulted from violation of a substantive provision of RICO.

Of greatest interest to me, however, to substantiate a finding that the lawsuit’s allegations against Chuck Dolan lacked any reasonable factual basis, Judge Middlebrook laid out how Habba misrepresented the Igor Danchenko indictment to include Dolan in her conspiracy theories. Middlebrook focused closely on Habba’s claims that the pee tape allegation in the Steele dossier “was derived from Dolan.” He rejected Habba’s defense of the allegations against Dolan by pointing to stuff she left out.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers claim “nearly all” of the allegations against Mr. Dolan were sourced directly from the Indictment brought against Igor Danchenko by special counsel John Durham. (DE 270-2 at 6). But this is simply not so. As was the practice throughout the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff cherry-picked portions which supported his narrative while ignoring those that undermined or contradicted it.1 Mr. Trump’s lawyers persisted in this misrepresentation after being warned by the sanctions motion, and they doubled down on this falsehood in their response to the motion.

[snip]

Even more telling are the portions of the Indictment ignored by Plaintiff. The Indictment alleges that Mr. Dolan and others were planning a business conference to be held in Moscow on behalf of businessmen seeking to explore investments in Russia. (DE 270-2 ¶ 21). Mr. Danchenko was introduced to Mr. Dolan in connection with business activities. (Id. ¶ 18).

Significantly the Indictment alleges two other facts relevant to and, if true, fatal to Plaintiff’s claim of conspiracy.

According to [Mr. Dolan], individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign did not direct, and were not aware of, the aforementioned meetings and activities with Danchenko and other Russian nationals.

***

According to [Mr. Dolan], he [Mr. Dolan] was not aware at the time of the specifics of Danchenko’s ‘project against Trump,’ or that Danchenko’s reporting would be provided to the FBI.

And with regard to the allegation about sexual activity, the Indictment alleges that Mr. Dolan and another individual were given a tour of a Moscow hotel in June 2016, told that Mr. Trump had previously stayed in the Presidential suite, and according to both Mr. Dolan and the other individual, the staff member who gave the tour did not mention any sexual or salacious activity. (Id. ¶¶ 60-61). The Indictment does not allege that the information concerning sexual activity was provided by Mr. Dolan.

The May 31, 2022 warning letter told the Trump lawyers that Mr. Dolan had been questioned by the FBI on multiple occasions, that the Danchenko Indictment detailed his contacts with Mr. Danchenko but did not indicate he “discussed any sexual rumors with Mr. Danchenko — because he did not.” (DE 268-1 at 2). The Indictment confirms that Mr. Dolan spoke to the FBI, and not only was he not charged with any falsehood, but his statements are included within the Indictment. The Indictment contradicts rather than supports Plaintiff’s allegations against Mr. Dolan. Far from being “sourced directly” and cited “word-for-word,” (DE 270 at 5), Plaintiff’s use of the Indictment is nothing short of a deliberate disregard of the truth or falsity of their claims. This is a textbook example of sanctionable conduct under Rule 11.

Rather than express any regret, Plaintiff doubled down on his claims: “Plaintiff’s allegation that Defendant was the source of the salacious sexual activity rumor has a legitimate factual basis and is based upon a well-reasoned theory that may well be proven correct during the [Office of Special Counsel’s] upcoming trial of Danchenko.” (DE 270 at 10).

It was never to be. In the Danchenko trial, Mr. Dolan was called as a witness by the government about matters unrelated to the Ritz Carlton rumors. The government never alleged that Mr. Dolan was a source for the Ritz Carlton story. See Order, United States v. Igor Y. Danchenko, Case No. 21-cr-00245-AJT at 5 (Oct. 4, 2022). And Mr. Danchenko was ultimately acquitted by the jury.

1 The “sourced directly” claim is untrue. For example, the Indictment says: “In or about April 2016, Danchenko and [Mr. Dolan] engaged in discussions regarding potential business collaboration between PR Firm-1 and UK Investigative Firm-1 on issues related to Russia.” (DE 270-2 ¶ 23). The Amended Complaint, however, states: “In late April 2016 Danchenko began having discussions with Dolan about a potential business collaboration between Orbis Ltd. and Kglobal to create a ‘dossier’ to smear Donald J. Trump and to disseminate the false accusations to the media.” (Am. Compl. ¶ 96(c)).

The order as a whole generated a lot of attention on the failed birdsite. But there was no self-awareness that the exercise that Habba engaged in with respect to Dolan and the Danchenko prosecution was similar to what a number of journalists (and a great number of right wingers and other frothers) themselves did, when the Danchenko indictment was rolled out last year.

For example, here’s what the WaPo claimed in a still-uncorrected report last year:

Durham says Danchenko [1] made up a conversation [2] he claimed was the source of one of the dossier’s most salacious claims, that Trump paid prostitutes at a Moscow hotel room to urinate on a bed in which President Barack Obama had once slept. The dossier also suggested Russian intelligence agencies had secretly recorded that event as potential blackmail material. Trump has denied any such encounter.

The indictment [3] suggests that story came from Dolan, who in June 2016 toured a suite at a hotel in Moscow that was once occupied by Trump. According to the indictment, Danchenko [4] falsely told Steele and the FBI that the information came from the president of the U.S. Russian-American Chamber of Commerce at the time.

All four of the above claims are not supported by the indictment, much less Danchenko’s published interviews with the FBI, which attributed the pee tape claim to someone else — though it is definitely the case that Durham encouraged such unsupported inferences.

Jonathan Swan condensed the same kinds of claims that Habba just got sanctioned for in one tweet.

Just one “rumor” was attributed to Dolan in the Danchenko indictment, the most provably true one (because it came from media coverage), and one about which — as the trial established — the FBI never once asked Danchenko, in significant part because it had nothing to do with Russia.

And while Middlebrook notes that Danchenko was acquitted, he doesn’t note that Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed the single Dolan count because the allegedly false statement Danchenko made about Dolan was “literally true.” That should not have been a surprising judgment. I noted problems with that charge exactly a year ago, when I catalogued all the sloppy reporting on the Danchenko indictment.

Middlebrook’s order makes for great reading. It’s fun to laugh at Habba getting called out.

But it should bring some reflection from the journalists who made the same kind of logical jumps that Habba did, but who cannot be sanctioned for professional failures.

Middlebrook may not be done. The other defendants have asked for sanctions, as well (though without doing the same preparation in advance to ask for Rule 11 sanctions). So Donald Trump’s lawyers may yet have the privilege of paying Peter Strzok and Hillary Clinton for the privilege of having sued them.

Update: Corrected Middlebrook’s name.

John Durham Avenged Warrants Targeting Carter Page by Getting a Warrant Targeting Sergei Millian

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In both his opening and closing statements, John Durham prosecutor Michael Keilty described the materiality of the alleged lies Igor Danchenko told the FBI about Sergei Millian by pointing to the role the Steele report on Millian played in getting FISA warrants targeting Carter Page.

The evidence in this trial will show that the Steele dossier would cause the FBI to engage in troubling conduct that would ultimately result in the extended surveillance of the United States citizens. And the defendant’s lies played a role in that surveillance.

[snip]

So let’s now talk about why the defendant’s lies matter. The defendant’s lies about Sergei Millian mattered because the information he allegedly received from Millian ended up in a FISA warrant against a U.S. citizen, one of the most intrusive tools the FBI has at its disposal. The FBI gets to listen to your calls and read your emails. It’s a really significant thing.

You heard Brian Auten testify that that Millian information — alleged Millian information was contained in every single FISA application on four different occasions. The FBI surveilled a U.S. citizen for nearly a year based on those lies.

Even accepting the problems of the FISA warrants, the claim never made any sense.

According to the trial record, Danchenko’s information didn’t end up in FISA applications. Language Christopher Steele wrote based on Danchenko’s information did. Danchenko claimed that Steele had exaggerated it, and even after interviewing Steele twice, the FBI believed Danchenko.

Keilty was accusing Danchenko of doing something that — no one has contested — that Steele did, not Danchenko.

Plus, two of the alleged lies took place after the FBI had ceased surveilling Page, in October and November 2017. Even if Danchenko did lie, it would defy the laws of physics to blame those alleged lies for surveillance that ended in September.

Crazier still, one reason why DOJ retroactively withdrew the probable cause claims for the last two FISA orders on Page, obtained in April and June 2017, is because FBI didn’t integrate the warnings Danchenko gave them about the report in the applications. Danchenko is the last person you should blame for the FISA surveillance of Page. He claims he didn’t even know the reports were being shared with the FBI!

The obvious problems with this claim have not stopped stupid propagandists like Margot Cleveland from repeating the nonsensical claim.

It all the weirder, though, when you consider that John Durham was himself responsible for obtaining senseless search warrants against two American citizens.

First, there are the warrants Durham served to obtain Chuck Dolan’s communication, as Stuart Sears had Dolan explain on cross examination.

Q You’re aware, Mr. Dolan, aren’t you, that the government was investigating you at some point?

A Yes.

Q You’re aware that they issued search warrants and subpoenas for your email communications?

A Yes.

Q You’re aware that they issued subpoenas for your phone records?

A Yes.

Q Your work email records?

A Yes.

Q Your Facebook records?

A Yes.

As Sears had Dolan explain, those warrants yielded nothing to refute his claim never to have “talked” to Danchenko about anything that appeared in the dossier.

Q And I think you have already testified to this, but even knowing everything that the government has done to look into you, it’s still your testimony today that you’ve never talked to Mr. Danchenko about anything that ended up in the dossier, correct?

A Correct.

Last Friday, in dismissing the single count pertaining to Dolan, Judge Trenga ruled that any evidence these warrants targeting Dolan yielded did not prove a crime.

And Durham also obtained warrants targeting Sergei Millian — one of his purported victims! — who at least in 2016 had dual citizenship. Durham had his case agent, Ryan James, describe all the surveillance Durham did of Millian.

Q With respect to those documents, tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury whether you personally have been involved in sorting through those records.

A Yes, I have.

Q Travel records, the travel records relating to Sergei Millian was brought to the jury’s attention. Who obtained those records?

A Our team did.

[snip]

Q The jury has heard testimony relating to a number of telephone numbers involved with a fellow by the name of Sergei Millian. Would you tell the jury, sir, whether or not you have any knowledge about records and information being retrieved concerning Sergei Millian.

A Our team requested legal process on some of his numbers that we’ve identified that belong to him.

Q When you say legal process, just so the jurors have an understanding of that, what kind of legal process would typically be involved in getting those records?

A In this particular case, subpoenas.

Q All right. And in addition to subpoenas, do you know if Facebook records and the like were retrieved using the leal process?

A Yes.

Q And what kind of legal process was used to obtain those records?

A Those would be via search warrants.

Even more than the Facebook warrant, Durham’s collection of Millian’s travel records — all the way through current day! — are probably more intrusive on Millian’s privacy.

Q Now, let me start, if I might then. With regard to the records in this matter, you’ve told the jurors that among those records that you obtained were travel records for Sergei Millian, correct?

A Yes.

Q And with respect to Millian’s travel records, how would you describe them? Were they plentiful or there was one or two? What’s your best recollection as to Millian’s travel records?

A I would say he frequently comes in and out of this country.

Q Based on your review of all the travel records, has he been in the country anytime recently?

A No.

It’s too early to say whether any of these records included evidence of a crime. After all, DOJ’s KleptoCapture complaint against Elena Branson shows that one of Millian’s colleagues at the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce viewed the requirement to register under FARA as a “problem” way back in 2013.

But according to an EDVA jury, any evidence the warrants and subpoenas targeting Millian obtained did not prove Danchenko committed a crime.

Durham unpacked the digital lives of two American citizens, plus Danchenko, partly through search warrants that he attacked Mueller’s investigators for not obtaining.

And unless the evidence obtained ends up being used to show that Millian was an illegal foreign agent of Russia, that evidence did not provide that anyone committed a crime.

The right wing is defending John Durham today because he avenged an American who was unfairly targeted by a warrant. And along the way, they seem to have missed that Durham himself obtained a bunch of apparently pointless search warrants targeting American citizens, including Trump fan Sergei Millian.

John Durham Twice Misread Steele Dossier Sourcing to Invent a Partisan Claim

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To understand what a train wreck FBI Supervisory Analyst Brian Auten was for John Durham’s case yesterday, let’s start with the fact that, on redirect, Durham lied about — or maybe just doesn’t understand — what Igor Danchenko said to the FBI about Sergei Millian in January 2017. He did so when trying to get Auten to agree that Millian couldn’t have called Danchenko because he’s a Trump supporter.

Q. So would you find it peculiar that somebody who had never spoken to Millian, Millian never spoken to him, would be telling somebody he doesn’t know about a, quote, well-developed conspiracy of cooperation, between The Trump Organization and Russian leadership?

A. I mean, I would say that is peculiar, yes.

Q. That is very peculiar, right?

A. Yes.

Q. Almost unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? A. I don’t know if I would say “unbelievable,” but I would say “peculiar.”

Durham, of course, was citing from the Steele dossier’s report attributed to Sergei Millian, which Danchenko didn’t write and claimed not to have seen before it was published. In fact, one of the reasons why the FBI found Danchenko was credible is that he didn’t try to protect Steele. Danchenko implied that Steele exaggerated his report on Millian, which instead amounted to a 10 to 15 minute phone call.

More importantly, Danchenko claims that he didn’t tell Steele that Millian had described a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.” On the contrary, Danchenko told the FBI that Millian had told him there were ties between Russia and Trump, but there was “nothing bad about it.”

[The Primary Sub-source] recalls that this 10-15 minute conversation included a general discussion about Trump and the Kremlin, that there was “communication” between the parties, and that it was an ongoing relationship. (The Primary Sub-source] recalls that the individual believed to be [Source E in Report 95] said that there was “exchange of information” between Trump and the Kremlin, and that there was “nothing bad about it.” [Source E] said that some of this information exchange could be good for Russia, and some could be damaging to Trump, but deniable. The individual said that the Kremlin might be of help to get Trump elected, but [the Primary Sub-source] did not recall any discussion or mention of Wiki[L]eaks.

If Danchenko is to be believed — and the FBI long believed he was — Danchenko interpreted Millian’s comments as helpful for, not harmful to, to Trump.

And that’s important because a fundamental article of faith, as far as John Durham goes, is that someone’s political party dictates all regarding sourcing. Millian couldn’t have called Danchenko, in Durham’s book (even though a whole ton of evidence was presented that he could have), because he was a vocal Trump supporter.

Q. Right. Did you find it at all peculiar — you and your colleagues find it at all peculiar that somebody who is an avid Trump supporter would be calling somebody he had never met and talked to before to provide negative information about the Trump campaign?

A. I would say, in this case, you don’t know.

Durham needs the Millian report to be negative because he needs to find a partisan angle to everything in the dossier, but he simply invents what Danchenko — as opposed to Steele — claims Millian said.

By comparison, Durham suggests that Chuck Dolan’s role in potentially sourcing the arguably most accurate report in the dossier (it’s unsurprising it was accurate because it was based on press coverage) is suspect because of Dolan’s role in Democratic politics.

BY MR. DURHAM: Q Do you recall whether or not when you were chatting with Mr. Danchenko in January 2017 if he indicated that the work he was doing with Christopher Steele was an important project for him?

A I don’t know if he characterized it as an important project for him, but he characterized it as a project that he was very busy with.

Q With respect to the second part of that sentence, “…and our goals clearly coincide,” in context Mr. Danchenko’s and Mr. Dolan’s goals?

A That is how I would read that.

Q Would it have been of value to the FBI to know that Mr. Danchenko’s goals and Mr. Dolan’s goals related to the Trump campaign coincided?

[snip]

Q And with respect to goals coinciding, let me ask you this: Did you determine whether or not Mr. Dolan had any particular partisan persuasion?

A Yes.

Q And what was that?

A Democratic.

Q And how deeply involved in democratic politics was Mr. Dolan, if you know, based on your own personal participation in the investigation?

MR. ONORATO: Objection to relevance.

THE COURT: I’ll let him answer. Go ahead.

A I understand he worked with various aspects of democratic campaigns over the years.

Q And when you say over the years, was it like two or three years or a longer period?

A My recollection is it was longer.

Q Much longer?

A For a while back. I wouldn’t be able to actually specify how long back.

Q In any event, it would have been valuable for you to know that Mr. Danchenko’s goals coincided with Mr. Dolan’s goals, correct?

Note, Durham doesn’t consider — apparently doesn’t even conceive of the possibility — that Danchenko would have told Dolan their goals coincide as an appeal to Dolan’s partisanship even if he himself had none.

Steele (and therefore Danchenko) was first paid to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort by Oleg Deripaska, someone working to get Trump elected, and in fact one of the most important new details of this exchange is that Danchenko prefaced it by referencing asking someone much earlier, in May — possibly during the time when Deripaska was still paying the tab — for dirt on Manafort. With regards to Manafort, it’s not clear Danchenko would have reason to distinguish between the two projects paying to develop dirt (and he didn’t know precisely who was paying either time). He wanted dirt and the record shows that even someone closely tied to Manafort, Deripaska, was willing to pay for that dirt.

In any case, Durham makes a materiality claim that it was really important for the FBI to know Dolan’s partisan leanings.

Q. But for the FBI’s purposes in evaluating 105, Government’s Exhibit 112, was of significance this reportedly was coming from, quote, an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign, closed quote?

A. Yes, that was important.

Q. So with respect, then, to that information, that person that was providing the information, was Donald — was Charles Dolan, would that be import to you?

A. Yes, that would be of import.

Later, to play up the import of Dolan’s politics, Durham again misreads the dossier and in the process, misstates his entire case. He implies that the FBI, in assessing Report 105 — which, as Danchenko’s lawyer got Auten to agree, “has absolutely nothing to do about collusion in Russia, which is the whole point that Crossfire Hurricane was opened,” but which is Durham’s single piece of evidence that the Steele dossier was sourced to Democrats — should have known that a source described as “an American political figure associated with Donald TRUMP and his campaign” was actually a Democrat.

Q. And would it be of import to you that Mr. Dolan was not somebody who was an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign but, in fact, was a Democratic operative for a long period of time? Would that have been significant to you?

A. Yes, we were interested in all of the —

Q. Right.

A. — sources.

Q. So if you knew that that was the case, it wasn’t some Republican insider or some associate of Donald Trump’s, what, if any, impact did that have on your evaluation of the validity and credibility of the information that’s being conveyed in these dossier reports?

A. Well, it helps — it would have helped to understand kind of accuracy and things of that sort for the dossier reports.

Except that, once again, that’s not what the sourcing indicates. If Durham’s allegations are correct and this came from Dolan, it amounts to Danchenko sourcing something Dolan attributed to a Republican friend of his. If this claim is inaccurate, it’s not because Danchenko lied, it’s because Dolan did.

That is, Durham’s problem isn’t that Dolan is a Democrat. It’s that Dolan — his own witness — is an admitted fabricator.

And John Durham is trying so hard to invent partisanship rather than Russian rat-fuckery, that he doesn’t understand he’s impugning his source, not Danchenko.

Will KleptoCapture Catch John Durham, Along with the Russian Spies and Oligarchs?

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I’ve been right about a lot of things regarding John Durham’s investigation (though not, apparently, that he would supersede the indictment against Michael Sussmann — maybe he was afraid of getting no-billed if he corrected the things in the indictment he has since discovered to be false?).

Perhaps the most prescient observation I’ve made, though, was that Durham had no fucking clue where to look for evidence related to his already-charged allegations.

I’ve seen reason to believe Durham doesn’t understand the full scope of where he needs to look to find evidence relevant to that case.

I said that in November. Since that time in the Sussmann case, Durham has had to publicly confess he had not:

Effectively, Durham spent most of three years speaking to those who would confirm his conspiracy theories, and not consulting the actual evidence. It took until six months after Durham charged Sussmann before Durham tested Sussmann’s sworn explanation for his Baker meeting — and when he checked, he found the evidence backed Sussmann’s explanation.

Six months after indicting Igor Danchenko, Durham asked to extend discovery another month

It’s that record that makes me so interested in Durham’s second bid to extend deadlines for classified discovery in the Igor Danchenko case.

After Danchenko argued he couldn’t be ready for an April 18 trial date, Durham proposed a March 29 deadline for prosecutors to meet classified discovery; that means Durham originally imagined he’d be done with classified discovery over six weeks ago. A week before that deadline, Durham asked for a six week delay — to what would have been Friday. Danchenko consented to the change and Judge Anthony Trenga granted it. Then on Monday, Durham asked for another extension, this time for another month.

When Durham asked for the first delay, he boasted they had provided Danchenko 60,000 unclassified documents and promised “a large volume” of classified discovery that week (that is, before the original deadline).

To date, the government has produced over 60,000 documents in unclassified discovery. A portion of these documents were originally marked “classified” and the government has worked with the appropriate declassification authorities to produce the documents in an unclassified format.

[snip]

Nevertheless, the government will produce a large volume of classified discovery this week

This more recent filing boasts of having provided just one thousand more unclassified documents and a mere 5,000 classified documents — for a case implicating two known FISA orders and several past and current counterintelligence investigations.

To date, the Government has produced to the defense over 5,000 documents in classified discovery and nearly 61,000 documents in unclassified discovery. The Government believes that the 5,000 classified documents produced to date represent the bulk of the classified discovery in this matter.

Danchenko waited six weeks and got almost nothing new.

See this post for an explanation of all the classified information that Danchenko should be able to demand and the onerous process that using it requires, called Classified Information Procedures Act. Even in November, I showed that Danchenko could likely make a case that he should get discovery from the FBI and NSA, and probably CIA and Treasury. There is no way Durham is getting through this case with just 5,000 classified documents.

As he noted in his opposition to this latest request for an extension, with each request, Durham’s proposed schedule was shrinking the time afforded Danchenko to review classified discovery before providing a list of the classified information he wanted to use at trial (called a CIPA 5 notice), first from 60 days to 40, and then from 40 days to 22.

On March 22, 2022, the Special Counsel filed a Consent Motion to Adjourn the Classified Discovery and CIPA Schedule. Dkt. 44. In his Motion, the Special Counsel sought to extend the deadline to produce classified discovery from March 29, 2022, to May 13, 2022. Id. at 2. The Special Counsel’s motion also sought to extend the dates for various CIPA filings and hearings. Id. Importantly, the Special Counsel’s proposed schedule reduced the amount of time within which Mr. Danchenko had to file his Section 5(a) written notice from approximately 60 days after the close of classified discovery to approximately 40 days.

[snip]

On May 9, 2022, the Special Counsel filed his Second Motion to Adjourn the Classified Discovery and CIPA Schedule. Dkt. 48. In his motion, the Special Counsel now tells the Court that he can provide the outstanding classified discovery by “no later than” June 13, 2022. See id. at 2. He also proposes a June 29, 2022, deadline for Defendant’s Section 5(a) written notice. Id. Therefore, the Special Counsel has essentially asked this Court to enter an Order that will now decrease Mr. Danchenko’s time within which to file his Section 5(a) written notice from approximately 40 days after the close of classified discovery to approximately 22 days.

[snip]

Mr. Danchenko would be substantially prejudiced by the Special Counsel’s proposed schedule because it significantly shortens the time period within which Mr. Danchenko can review any final classified productions and file his CIPA Section 5(a) notice. That is of particular concern to Mr. Danchenko because the Special Counsel has not provided sufficient notice of how much additional classified discovery may be forthcoming other than his “belie[f]” that the “bulk” of the classified discovery has already been produced.

Shrinking Danchenko’s deadlines would make the additional discovery that is still outstanding far less useful. In the Sussmann case, for example, it took over a month for Sussmann’s team to find the documents that disprove Durham’s case buried among 22,000 other documents provided on his extended deadline. So while Durham might be trying to comply with discovery obligations, arguing that the proper solution to his struggles fulfilling discovery is to shrink Danchenko’s own time to review the evidence suggests he’s not doing so in good faith.

Judge Trenga must have agreed. While he granted the government’s request for an extension, he gave Danchenko 42 days to submit his CIPA 5 notice.

A Russian dog named Putin ate Durham’s classified homework

I’ve noted how the post-invasion sanctions on Alfa Bank deprived John Durham of a second investigative team, Alfa Bank’s Skadden Arps lawyers, whose filings a judge observed seemed to be “written by the same people” as Durham’s.

But the aftermath of Putin’s attempt to overthrow Ukraine may be causing Durham even bigger problems in the Danchenko case.

When Durham asked for an extension of his CIPA deadline in the Sussmann case days after Russia extended its invasion of Ukraine, he explained that the people who had to write declarations in support of CIPA (usually agency heads like CIA Director William Burns or NSA Director Paul Nakasone) were busy dealing with the response to Ukraine.

However, the Government’s submission includes not only the Government’s memorandum but also one or more supporting declarations from officials of the U.S. intelligence community. The Government’s review of potentially discoverable material is ongoing, and these officials cannot finalize their declarations until that review is complete.

Moreover, recent world events in Ukraine have further delayed the Government’s review and the officials’ preparation of the supporting declaration(s). As a result, the Government respectfully submits that a modest two-week adjournment request to its CIPA Section 4 filing deadline is appropriate and would not impact any other deadlines, to include the currently scheduled trial date

Effectively, this request moved the CIPA deadline from a week before Durham’s classified discovery deadline to a week after; yet Durham just committed, once again, to finalizing his CIPA 4 submission almost a week before his classified discovery deadline in the Danchenko case.

That’s important because Durham overpromised when he said he could finish a CIPA filing before the discovery deadline. Durham filed a supplement to his CIPA 4 notice on May 7 (nine days before trial) that, unless Judge Cooper ruled orally at a closed hearing last week, remains outstanding. That’s not entirely unusual in a case that relies on classified information, but if Cooper were to rule this classified information was necessary for Sussmann’s defense, it would give Sussmann no time to actually prepare to use it.

Durham cited the Ukraine response again on March 22, a month after Russia launched its failed attempt to take Kyiv, when he asked for an extension on his classified discovery deadline.

However, recent world events in Ukraine have contributed to delays in the production of classified discovery. The officials preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies are heavily engaged in matters related to Ukraine.

Importantly, these people focusing on keeping us safe from Russian aggression rather than, as Durham is, making us safe for Russian aggression, are different than the people cited in the Sussmann case. These aren’t senior officials, but instead those “preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies.” That’s not William Burns, that’s FBI counterintelligence agents, among others.

In last week’s request for an extension, Durham didn’t mention Ukraine, but his reference to “overseas activities” suggests the response to Ukraine remains the problem.

However, recent world events continue to contribute to delays in the processing and production of classified discovery. In particular, some of the officials preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies continue to be heavily engaged in matters related to overseas activities.

Unsurprisingly, Danchenko asked Trenga to require Durham to provide some kind of explanation for why “overseas activities,” probably Ukraine, continue to delay classified discovery in a case criminalizing an attempt to fight Russia’s attack on democracy in 2016.

Moreover, the Special Counsel has failed to adequately explain how “recent world events” (Dkt. 48 at 2) have specifically made it impossible for him to meet his discovery obligations. While it seems unlikely that the same government officials charged with declassifying discovery are also responding to events overseas, it certainly is possible. But, even if that is the case, the Special Counsel must offer more explanation than he has, especially in light of the fact that his prior motion to extend the discovery deadline was based on the events in Ukraine, and the ongoing nature of that conflict must or should have been considered when he requested the May 13 deadline.

Sadly, Trenga didn’t order up an explanation for why this delay, probably Ukraine-related, is causing so many difficulties for Durham’s prosecution of Danchenko.

KleptoCapture threatens at least one and possibly up to three key Durham figures

One reason I would have liked Trenga to force Durham to explain how a dog named Putin ate his classified homework is because the public response to Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine has already implicated three figures who are key to Durham’s case. While I need to update it, this post attempts to capture everything that the US government and some partners have done since the expanded invasion.

Dmitry Peskov

Perhaps the response least damaging to Durham’s case — but one that will affect discovery — involves Dmitry Peskov. As I explained in this post, Durham made Peskov’s relationship with Chuck Dolan and Olga Galkina a key part of his indictment against Danchenko.

In his role as a public relations professional, [Dolan] spent much of his career interacting with Eurasian clients with a particular focus on Russia. For example, from in or about 2006 through in or about 2014, the Russian Federation retained [Dolan] and his then-employer to handle global public relations for the Russian government and a state-owned energy company. [Dolan] served as a lead consultant during that project and frequently interacted with senior Russian Federation leadership whose names would later appear in the Company Reports, including the Press Secretary of the Russian Presidential Administration (“Russian Press Secretary-I”), the Deputy Press Secretary (“Russian Deputy Press Secretary-I”), and others in the Russian Presidential Press Department.

[snip]

In anticipation of the June 2016 Planning Trip to Moscow, [Dolan] also communicated with [Peskov] and Russian Deputy Press Secretary-I, both of whom worked in the Kremlin and, as noted above, also appeared in the Company Reports.

[snip]

Additionally, on or about July 13, 2016, [Galkina] sent a message to a Russia-based associate and stated that [Dolan] had written a letter to Russian Press Secretary-1 in support of [Galkina]’s candidacy for a position in the Russian Presidential Administration.

On March 3, the State Department added Peskov to the sanctions list under a 2021 Executive Order President Biden signed, in part, to target those who (among other things), “undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States and its allies and partners.” On March 11, Treasury added Peskov’s family members to the sanctions list. The package used to sanction Peskov would have been the product of intelligence reports circulated within the US government.

While the legal reason Peskov was sanctioned pertained to his official role in the Russian government (and the lavish lifestyles his family enjoys even with his civil service salary), State also described Peskov as “the chief propagandist of the Russian Federation.” That, by itself, would be unremarkable. But if — as even Durham alludes — Peskov had a role in feeding Galkina disinformation for the Steele dossier, particularly if he crafted disinformation to maximally exploit Michael Cohen’s secret call with Peskov’s office in January 2016, that could be a part of the sanctions package against Peskov. If it were, then it would be centrally important discovery for Danchenko.

Oleg Deripaska

Then there’s Oleg Deripaska. This post lays out in depth the reasons why Danchenko would have reason to demand information on Deripaska’s role in the dossier, including:

  • Evidence about whether Oleg Deripaska was Christopher Steele’s client for a project targeting Paul Manafort before the DNC one
  • All known details of Deripaska’s role in injecting disinformation into the dossier, up through current day
  • Details of all communications between Deripaska and Millian

Given his blissful ignorance of the actual results of the Mueller investigation and the DOJ IG Carter Page investigation, Durham was always going to have a nasty discovery surprise in complying with such requests. Plus, a search last October of two Deripaska-related properties made clear that the most likely source of disinformation in the dossier was under aggressive criminal investigation for sanctions violations.

A recent Bloomberg story reported that that criminal investigation has now been moved under and given the prioritization of the KleptoCapture initiative started in response to the Ukraine war.

Deripaska has been sanctioned since 2018 for his ties to Vladimir Putin, and the seizures at a Washington mansion and New York townhouse linked to him predate the invasion of Ukraine. But the investigation of Deripaska’s assets is now part of an escalating U.S. crackdown on ultra-rich Russians suspected of laundering money and hiding assets to help finance Putin’s regime.

The raids were key steps to unearth information that may determine whether — and how — Deripaska moved money around. Among the mishmash of items taken from the New York and Washington properties were half a dozen works of fine art, sunglasses, hiking boots, housewares, financial records, telephone bills and other documents, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the investigation hasn’t been made public.

The Deripaska inquiry is now part of a special U.S. Department of Justice task force dubbed “KleptoCapture,” according to New York federal prosecutor Andrew Adams, who is heading up the group.

“As Russia and its aggression continues, we have our eyes on every piece of art and real estate purchased with dirty money,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at a recent news conference.

If DOJ plans on indicting Deripaska — for sanctions violations and anything else on which the statute of limitations has not expired — they might delay discovery cooperation with Durham until they do so. And if such a hypothetical indictment mentioned Deripaska’s role in facilitating the 2016 election interference and/or successful efforts to exploit the dossier to undermine the Russian investigation, it might make Durham’s charges against Danchenko unsustainable, even if he is able to otherwise fulfill his discovery requirements. Durham’s theory of prosecution is that Danchenko is the big villain that led to FBI confusion over the dossier, but Deripaska seems to have had a far bigger role in that.

Sergei Millian

Finally, there’s Sergei Millian, who happened to meet with Deripaska in 2016 at an event, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, that played a key role in the election operation.

In the same week Millian met Deripaska, a bunch of cybersecurity experts first started looking for evidence of Russian hacking in DNS data and Igor Danchenko was in Moscow meeting with Chuck Dolan and his other named Steele dossier sources.

As the DOJ IG Report and declassified footnotes make clear, FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Millian in October 2016. All the evidence indicates that the investigation did not arise from Crossfire Hurricane and, given that Millian’s ID was hidden in the dossier reports shared with NYFO on their way to HQ, and given that other information on Millian was fed into DC, not NY, was probably predicated completely independent of Crossfire Hurricane.

In addition, we learned that [Millian] was at the time the subject of an open FBI counterintelligence investigation. 302 We also were concerned that the FISA application did not disclose to the court the FBI’s belief that this sub-source was, at the time of the application, the subject of such an investigation. We were told that the Department will usually share with the FISC the fact that a source is a subject in an open case. The OI Attorney told us he did not recall knowing this information at the time of the first application, even though NYFO opened the case after consulting with and notifying Case Agent 1 and SSA 1 prior to October 12, 2016, nine days before the FISA application was filed. Case Agent 1 said that he may have mentioned the case to the OI Attorney “in passing,” but he did not specifically recall doing so. 303

301 As discussed in Chapter Four, [Millian] [redacted]

302 According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, [Millian] had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS. The document described reporting [redacted] that [Millian] “was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.” In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson and that Simpson had assessed that [Millian] was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.

303 Although an email indicates that the OI Attorney learned in March 2017 that the FBI had an open case on [Millian], the subsequent renewal applications did not include this fact. According to the OI Attorney, and as reflected in Renewal Application Nos. 2 and 3, the FBI expressed uncertainty about whether this sub‐source was Person 1. However, other FBI documents in the same time period reflect that the ongoing assumption by the Crossfire Hurricane team was that this sub‐source was [Millian].

Plus, Mueller found plenty on Millian to raise separate issues of concern.

Given several other counterintelligence cases developed in NYFO, the predication likely had more to do with Russia’s effort to use cultural and other diaspora groups as a way to covertly extend Russian influence.

And in fact, Millian’s group — the Russian American Chamber of Commerce — has already made a cameo appearance in one such prosecution, that against Elena Branson, a complaint that was rolled out in the same week as the sanctions against Peskov.

a. On or about January 30, 2013, BRANSON received an email from an individual using an email address ending in “mail.ru.” Based on my review of publicly available information, I have learned that this individual was a Senior Vice President of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. This email had the subject line “Problem.” and the text of the email included, among other things, a portion of the FARA Unit’s website with background on FARA. In response, BRANSON wrote, in part, “I am interested in the number of the law, its text in English[.]” The sender then responded with “Lena, read …” and copied into the email background on FARA and portions of the statute.

This awareness and flouting of registration requirements is the kind of thing that often features in prosecutions for 18 USC 951 violations. And, at least in the case of Branson, the statute of limitations can extend so long as the person in question continues to play a role in US politics, though in Branson’s case, she only fled the country 18 months ago.

If the FBI believed Millian was an unregistered foreign agent who fled to avoid an investigation in 2017, his ongoing involvement in efforts to gin up an investigation into the investigation — particularly claims that, even according to Durham, misinterpreted facts his own prosecutors filed and thereby contributed to death threats against witnesses in the investigation — then it wouldn’t rule out an investigation into Millian himself, an investigation that would have preceded Durham’s reckless reliance on him (or rather, Millian’s unvetted Twitter feed) as a star witness against Danchenko.

Even Millian’s public claim (albeit one offered by someone the FBI considers an embellisher) that he called the White House directly to elicit this investigation could be of interest.

We can now say with great certainty that Durham didn’t check the most obvious sources of evidence against key players involved in the Steele dossier, such as DOJ IG’s backup files in the Carter Page investigation that is the primary focus of Durham’s Danchenko indictment. That makes it highly likely he never bothered to see whether other parts of DOJ considered key players in the Steele dossier to be actual threats to democracy.

One of those key players is undoubtedly Oleg Deripaska. And the renewed focus on Russian influence operations may expand beyond that.

Wall Street Journal: Bigger Dupes of John Durham or Alexsej Gubarev?

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The Wall Street Journal claims they’ve cracked the Steele dossier!

In a 4,300-word romantic comedy, they claim that, “many of the dossier’s key details originated with a few people gossiping after they had been brought together over a minor corporate publicity contract.” There are several incorrect aspects of this fairy tale.

First, WSJ claims that, “the [Igor Danchenko] indictment pointed to Mr. Dolan as an important source for the dossier.” Even assuming the allegations in the indictment were accurate (some are not), that’s not what the indictment claims. It alleges that Dolan was the source for the perhaps most verifiably true claim in the dossier (which is not surprising given that Dolan told the FBI he simply repeated a news story). It suggests, as part of uncharged materiality claims, that Dolan may have played a part in but does not charge that he was the direct source for three other reports. That doesn’t make him “an important source” (though I’m sure Durham is happy he duped some reporters into making that claim).

Here’s how WSJ credulously takes the most spectacular of those materiality claims and repeats it, all without explaining that in the FBI interviews they otherwise cite repeatedly, Danchenko attributed the kompromat claim to Sergey Abyshev, who confirmed that he and Ivan Vorontsov met with Danchenko on that trip to Moscow.

One of Mr. Danchenko’s chats with Mr. Dolan appeared to figure in the dossier’s most inflammatory entry.

Mr. Dolan was helping to organize a fall 2016 conference in Moscow to drum up foreign investment. While in Moscow in June to lay the groundwork, he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. He met with the hotel’s general manager and got a tour of the hotel, including the presidential suite, according to the indictment of Mr. Danchenko. It says he also met with Mr. Danchenko, who was in town.

Less than a week later, Mr. Steele’s first dossier chapter alleged that a “Source D,” described as a close associate of Mr. Trump, had said Mr. Trump once hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed when he stayed in the Ritz-Carlton’s presidential suite, because former President Barack Obama, whom the dossier said Mr. Trump detested, had stayed there.

The dossier said the Kremlin had video and was holding it as kompromat, or compromising material. It said the episode had been confirmed by a senior member of the hotel staff and a female hotel staffer.

Prosecutors noted that the dossier reflected some details Mr. Dolan had learned on the hotel tour, such as that Mr. Trump had stayed at the hotel’s presidential suite.

Telling Danchenko that Trump had stayed at the Ritz — if that is where Danchenko learned that detail — is not serving as the key source here. Maybe Danchenko did make more of what Dolan told him, maybe Danchenko or Steele turned Dolan into Source D, but Durham has neither alleged nor charged it.

I’m sure he loves when reporters insinuate that he did, though.

Meanwhile, by claiming they’ve cracked the dossier with its “minor corporate publicity contract” story, WSJ misrepresents the relationship between Danchenko and someone who is an important source of the dossier, Olga Galkina. She played a part in more claims in the dossier than Dolan and those claims were far more important. Those include the most important one used in the Carter Page FISA application, the discredited Michael Cohen in Prague stories, as well as one of the claims that Durham suggests Dolan was involved with. WSJ suggests Danchenko only started obtaining information from her in the context of her relationship with Dolan.

What brought Mr. Danchenko, Mr. Dolan and Ms. Galkina together was a marketing campaign—funded by the Dolan PR client whose company was cited in the dossier.

He was Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian internet entrepreneur living in Cyprus, who decided in early 2016 to launch a U.S. marketing campaign to burnish the image of his cloud server company.

That’s affirmatively misleading, because Danchenko was using Galkina as a source before he ever formally met Dolan. In Danchenko’s interview, for example, he describes using Galkina as a source for other projects. “[Danchenko] has been able to collect information for Orbis across a wide range of topics — major Russian firms; Russian state entities, including the Kremlin.” Importantly, Galkina knew that Danchenko worked in business intelligence and even tried to task him in the period after the dossier became public.

Having therefore misrepresented the relationship between Danchenko and Galkina, WSJ repeats a second time that many of the claims in the dossier came from “this route,” meaning the PR relationship.

Mr. Danchenko told the FBI of other people he also spoke to in gathering information for Mr. Steele. Many of his details, however, came through this route, the Journal’s review shows.

The spreadsheet the FBI used to vet the dossier identified well over a hundred discrete claims in the dossier. Durham alleges that Chuck Dolan was the source for one claim and involved with part of the sourcing for three others. That’s not “many” out of a hundred. So once you correct for WSJ’s false claims about the Galkina relationship, that claim too falls apart.

Crazier still, WSJ makes no mention of the reason the newly formed relationship between Galkina and Dolan was important — and important to at least one of the central false claims in the dossier. As the indictment describes, that relationship allowed Galkina to use Dolan’s access to the Kremlin for her own benefit.

b. Additionally, on or about July 13, 2016, [Galkina] sent a message to a Russia-based associate and stated that [Dolan] had written a letter to Russian Press Secretary-1 in support of [Galkina]’s candidacy for a position in the Russian Presidential Administration.

Dolan used his ties to Dmitry Peskov to help Galkina. That’s the import of the relationship! But if you acknowledge that, then a key premise of the story, most notably its claim that, “much of the dossier’s information came from [] anything but Kremlin insiders,” falls apart because it presents the possibility that the Cohen in Prague story came from Peskov.

Dmitry Peskov is the quintessential Kremlin insider. He also knew firsthand that Donald Trump was lying on the campaign trail to hide a secret conversation Michael Cohen had had with Peskov’s own office in January 2016. Dolan helped Galkina get closer to Peskov. And after that happened, when Danchenko asked Galkina for information on a number of Trump flunkies, Cohen’s name is the one that Galkina “almost immediately” recognized. If Peskov was involved in all that, then it explains a great deal about the most damning claim in the dossier.

Peskov’s name doesn’t appear in the WSJ story.

Another name that doesn’t appear in the WSJ is Oleg Deripaska’s, even while WSJ puzzles over whether the dossier was intentionally filled with disinformation.

One remaining riddle is whether the dossier’s misinformation was purely careless or might have included disinformation sown by the Kremlin itself.

WSJ cites the DOJ IG Report on Carter Page repeatedly, so they know all the references to Deripaska in it (though perhaps not the declassified footnotes reporting that Deripaska, whose associate Konstantin Kilimnik played a key role in the election interference operation, may have learned of the dossier project by early July). But they’re silent on Danchenko’s earlier tasking to collect on Paul Manafort for Deripaska, which is at least as central to understanding the dossier as the ties between Dolan and Galkina.

Mr. Danchenko’s work for Mr. Steele, which had mostly involved business intelligence, also took a turn toward politics. Mr. Steele, a former agent in Russia for the British intelligence agency MI-6, asked Mr. Danchenko to work on a new assignment Mr. Steele had accepted: to look for compromising material on Mr. Trump in Russia.

It’s like WSJ made a conscious decision not to name any of the sanctioned Russians who played a role in the dossier.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that the WSJ journalists who claim to have cracked the dossier make several false claims about the Mueller investigation.

But Mr. Mueller reported no evidence that the campaign conspired with Russia’s military intelligence apparatus as it hacked into the email of the Democratic National Committee. The dossier took real events, such as the visit of a Trump adviser to Moscow, and expounded on them by describing meetings with high-level Kremlin officials for which no corroborating evidence surfaced.

It’s actually false that there was no corroboration for the Igor Sechin claim. The son of the guy who hosted Carter Page in Moscow described hearing the rumor too (and also described that they couldn’t account for all of Page’s time in Moscow).

Crazier still, it takes a special kind of incompetence to assert, as fact, that, “Mueller reported no evidence that the campaign conspired” with GRU, basing that claim on a report on Bill Barr’s letter to Congress that a judge subsequently ruled lacked candor. Mueller found evidence that the campaign conspired with Russia, just not enough to charge. He also got verdicts or rulings that Michael Cohen lied about his secret communications with Peskov (in which Cohen said he’d be happy to chase a real estate deal relying on a former GRU officer as broker), the Coffee Boy lied about getting advance notice of Russia’s plans, Manafort lied about passing polling data and campaign strategy to Kilimnik, and Mike Flynn lied about his attempt to undermine sanctions on Russia. The Mueller Report also revealed that “a Section 1030 conspiracy charge against Stone,” and the GRU was, “the subject of ongoing investigations that have been referred by this Office to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office” (though Barr buried this detail in the 2020 election); a referral for further investigation of a hacking conspiracy is the opposite of finding no evidence of a conspiracy. And a jury found that Stone had lied to cover up what his real ties to the Russian operation were.

I mean, seriously, it’s 2022. No legitimate journalist has an excuse for sounding like a Seth Rich truther, as WSJ’s two journalists do.

So the WSJ doesn’t mention Peskov and doesn’t mention Deripaska. It does, however, mention Aleksej Gubarev, who seems to have enthusiastically participated in a misleading story claiming that his contractor, Dolan, and his employee, Galkina, were singularly responsible for the dossier.

Mr. Gubarev’s company flew Mr. Dolan and two KGlobal colleagues to Cyprus in July 2016 and put them up at the Four Seasons hotel so they could deliver a sales pitch, Mr. Gubarev said. With Mr. Trump clinching the Republican nomination in the U.S., the talk in Cyprus wandered into politics.

[snip]

Mr. Gubarev said he learned about the report when a friend sent him a link to the BuzzFeed article. Mr. Gubarev said that at first he didn’t take it seriously, writing an email to Mr. Dolan with a smiling emoticon in the subject line and saying “need to found out who is make this stupid report.”

Mr. Dolan told him he thought the report might get traction in public. “It will have some legs with the sex allegations,” he wrote

Mr. Gubarev had declined to renew the publicity campaign for which he hired Mr. Dolan, saying he expected more for the $75,000 his company spent. But after the dossier’s publication, Mr. Gubarev hired Mr. Dolan again, this time to fight off the bad press, as Western banks were moving to cut his credit lines.

Mr. Gubarev said Mr. Dolan told him that Mr. Danchenko likely had compiled the dossier for Mr. Steele.

Mr. Gubarev sued BuzzFeed and Mr. Steele, lodging defamation claims in Florida and at the High Court in London.

[snip]

Mr. Gubarev said he was shocked that the indictment pointed to Mr. Dolan as an important source for the dossier. He said Mr. Dolan did a good job helping him fight to clear his name. “He is a nice guy, he did his best,” Mr. Gubarev said. “Washington is a strange place that I don’t understand.”

WSJ repeats all these Gubarev claims without noting that his lawfare was just one part of an extended campaign of lawfare, one that involves people like Petr Aven and Yevgeniy Prigozhin with known direct ties to and taskings from Putin.

In a story that openly wonders about instruments of disinformation, you’d think they’d be a bit more curious about why Gubarev would participate so enthusiastically. But then, a story that claims to explain, “how the Steele dossier was created,” by ignoring Deripaska’s pre-existing relationship with Steele and four of the most important sources for it is itself a vehicle of disinformation.

Update: In related news, Durham wants another month extension on classified discovery; the people they need help from are too busy indicting Russian foreign agents, including one who discussed that FARA was a “problem” with an employe of one of Durham’s star witness, Sergei Millian. Danchenko objects to the delay.

However, recent world events continue to contribute to delays in the processing and production of classified discovery. In particular, some of the officials preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies continue to be heavily engaged in matters related to overseas activities. Nevertheless, the Government is continuing to press the relevant authorities to produce documents in classified discovery as quickly as possible and on a rolling basis, and no later than the proposed deadline set forth below.

Durham claims there are only 5,000 still-classified pages in discovery.

To date, the Government has produced to the defense over 5,000 documents in classified discovery and nearly 61,000 documents in unclassified discovery. The Government believes that the 5,000 classified documents produced to date represent the bulk of the classified discovery in this matter.

For the reasons laid out in this post, I find that spectacularly unbelievable.

The original deadline was March 29. They want the deadline extended to June 13, which would be a 76-day extension.