Sergei Millian (YouTube clipping)
(…) The remaining four charges laid out in Durham’s indictment of Danchenko relate to Sergei Millian, an American national of Belarus descent. Many of the details behind these charges were already known to those who had been investigating the Russia-Collusion stories.
Durham’s indictment alleges that Danchenko lied to the FBI on four separate occasions, each time claiming that he’d had a phone conversation in the summer of 2016 with someone he believed to have been Millian. For his part, Millian has always stated that he never met Danchenko, in person or by phone. Millian’s assertions are emphatically proven in Durham’s indictment of Danchenko where it is repeatedly stated that “Danchenko never spoke to Chamber President-1 [Millian].”
Millian differed from all of Steele’s other purported sources in that he had no actual contact with anyone within Steele’s orbit—including Danchenko. Steele has demonstrated a preference for his targets to be physically present with his operatives. And indeed, Steele told the FBI that he believed Danchenko had met with Millian on “two or three separate occasions.”
The allegations attributed to Millian are crucial to the Steele dossier. Steele used Millian as the supposed source for his allegations of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was foundational to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Steele further attributed Millian as the source for allegations regarding secret communications between Russian Alfa Bank and Trump. Also ascribed to Millian were the Wikileaks email dump and the salacious “pee tape” story. All from a person whom neither Steele nor Danchenko had ever met with or spoken to.
Danchenko admitted to the FBI that his first outreach to Millian was on July 22, 2016, via email, which is cited in Durham’s indictment. But by this point, Steele, apparently believing that Danchenko had actually met Millian, had already published two reports in his dossier that attributed specific allegations to Millian. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI in a November 2017 follow-up interview, Steele erroneously believed that there had been in-person meetings between Danchenko and Millian, a belief which Danchenko did not correct.
It is unlikely that Steele would have placed so much emphasis on Millian as a major source without a plausible scenario for how these stories were obtained. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 11/05/2021)