The main source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier doesn’t want special counsel John Durham to be allowed to undermine the infamous “pee tape” claims about former President Donald Trump during his October trial.
Igor Danchenko, who will be tried next month after allegedly lying to the FBI about the dossier, has moved to distance himself from the scandalous and unfounded Ritz-Carlton claim. The Russian’s lawyers contended that the statements about the so-called pee tape are “immaterial, irrelevant, and impermissible character evidence.”
The tape in question was an alleged recording that the Steele dossier said Russians possessed depicting Trump with prostitutes at a hotel in 2013 during a Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump has denied the claims, and no evidence has emerged to support its existence.
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Durham’s team countered by arguing the claims are directly relevant to October’s trial.
“The Government should be permitted to present evidence of the defendant’s false statement regarding his sourcing of the Ritz-Carlton Allegations as direct evidence of the charged crime,” Durham’s team argued last week. “The defendant’s statements regarding these allegations constitute direct evidence of the charged offenses because they reflect the defendant’s efforts to fabricate and misattribute information reflected in the Steele Reports and provide important factual context regarding the two individuals — Charles Dolan and Sergei Millian — who are the subjects of the defendant’s false statements to the FBI.”
Danchenko’s attorneys said that “what Donald Trump did or did not do at a hotel in Moscow” and anything their client may have said about it is “entirely unrelated” to what is charged in the indictment against him. They said Durham was attempting to confuse issues, prejudice their client, and mislead the jury and asked the judge to put “clear limitations” on what evidence could be used at trial.
The “pee tape” issue comes after Durham charged last week in a bombshell filing that Danchenko was made a paid informant for the FBI from March 2017 to October 2020 and had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation by the bureau from 2009 to 2011.
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The Department of Justice’s watchdog concluded in 2019 that Danchenko undermined Steele’s unfounded claims of a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Moscow.
Robert Mueller’s special counsel report also indicated in a footnote that his team investigated the “pee tape” and found no evidence it exists. Mueller recounted a similar claim about “tapes from Russia” brought to the attention of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen by Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze in 2016. But, according to Mueller, what Rtskhiladze didn’t tell Cohen was that he’d also been “told the tapes were fake.”