Womp, Womp indeed. The “Russiagate” trope fizzles further. More millions wasted as Special Counsel Durham Will Still Publish A Report After Three-Year Investigation, Two Not-Guilty Verdicts. Another example of Trump obscuring his obstruction of justice in the Mueller probe by pushing for forms of official counter-lawfare, abusing the DoJ’s powers.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Igor Danchenko, an analyst who provided much of the research in a notorious dossier of unproven assertions and rumors about former President Donald J. Trump and Russia, was acquitted on Tuesday on four counts of lying to the F.B.I. about one of his sources.
The verdict was another stinging defeat for the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr three years ago to investigate the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have long insisted the inquiry would prove a “deep state” conspiracy against him, but after pursuing various baseless theories, Mr. Durham never found and charged one. Instead he developed two narrow cases accusing people involved in outside efforts to scrutinize purported links between Mr. Trump and Russia of making false statements.
The first of those cases ended in an acquittal of the defendant, Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with Democratic connections. The trial against Mr. Danchenko is expected to be the last of Mr. Durham’s prosecutions, and the special counsel is expected to submit a final report to the Justice Department this year summarizing his findings.
The jury deliberated for more than a day before finding Mr. Danchenko not guilty.
The accusations against Mr. Danchenko, an analyst who was born in Russia, centered on two of his sources for the salacious claims and unsubstantiated assertions in the so-called Steele dossier, which said that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were colluding with the Russian government. After BuzzFeed published the dossier in 2017, public suspicions of Mr. Trump escalated, but it has since been discredited.
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Mr. Trump and his supporters have falsely sought to conflate the dossier with the official investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, but the F.B.I. did not open the inquiry based on the dossier and the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, did not cite anything in it as evidence.
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The dossier's "broad assertion that Russia waged a campaign to interfere in the election is now accepted as fact by the US intelligence community."[354] With the passage of time and further revelations from various investigations and sources, it is becoming clearer that the overall thrust of the dossier was accurate:[114]
Some of the dossier's broad threads have now been independently corroborated. U.S. intelligence agencies and the special counsel's investigation into Russian election interference did eventually find that Kremlin-linked operatives ran an elaborate operation to promote Trump and hurt Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, as the dossier says in its main narrative.
— Jeff Donn, "Some Questions in Trump–Russia Dossier Now Finding Answers",
Associated Press (June 29, 2018)
[114]
Shepard Smith said: "Some of the assertions in the dossier have been confirmed. Other parts are unconfirmed. None of the dossier, to Fox News's knowledge, has been disproven."[193] In some cases, public verification is hindered because information is classified.[355][356]
According to Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, a major portion of the dossier's content is about Russian efforts to help Trump, and those allegations "turned out to be true".[357]
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