The case of Igor Danchenko is now being decided by the jury. This may be the last case brought by John Durham and today he argued that the FBI was the “elephant in the room” in this case.

Durham’s comment came as he wrapped up his effort to prove that Danchenko, the Russian national who served as the primary sub-source for the anti-Trump dossier, had lied to the FBI.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” Durham said. “The FBI.”

“The FBI failed here on a number of occasions,” Durham said.

But that’s not what the jury will be deciding today. Instead they’ll be focused on whether or not Danchenko lied to the FBI. Last week the judge tossed out one of the counts of the indictment. Danchenko told the FBI he hadn’t “talked” to a Democratic operative named Charles Dolan about information that wound up in the Steele Dossier. In fact, all of Danchenko’s exchanges had happened over email so the judge dismissed that count on the grounds that Danchenko’s statement was literally true. That left four counts.

The remaining four charges against the Russian researcher all relate to his claims to the FBI that he received an anonymous phone call in July 2016 from someone who relayed allegations that later appeared in the dossier. Danchenko said he believed the caller was Sergei Millian, then the head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

Prosecutors contend that Danchenko received no such call and he fabricated the story after coming under pressure to substantiate allegations he had related to Steele which wound up in the dossier.

“There was no call with Millian and there was no call with any individual and these phone records prove that,” attorney Michael Keilty said in the prosecution’s initial closing statement. “It’s a not-to-be believed story.”

The defense said the call could have taken place via a calling app and noted that Danchenko raised that possibility in one of his first discussions with the FBI.

In closing arguments, Durham’s attorney argued that Danchenko’s lies became part of the FISA court search warrant aimed at Carter Page. But it remains to be seen if the jury will believe that Danchenko, who didn’t testify in his own defense, got a call from some mystery app he can’t identify. That seems like a stretch to me. HAM radio operators could have delivered a call to the fillings in Danchenko’s teeth. I can’t prove it didn’t happen but I don’t think that’s a reasonable doubt.

In any case, whether Durham wins or loses this case, there has already been a big shift in how the media talks about the Steele dossier. Here’s the NY Times today:

After BuzzFeed published the dossier in 2017, public suspicions of Mr. Trump escalated, but it has since been discredited — in part because Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. that its author, the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, had exaggerated gossip that Mr. Danchenko had gathered for him…

The dossier was political opposition research indirectly funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee. They paid a law firm, which paid a research firm, which in turn subcontracted to a company run by Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele hired Mr. Danchenko to canvass contacts in Russia and Europe about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Russia.

Mr. Danchenko verbally conveyed rumors that Mr. Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a hotel room in Moscow. But during an interview with the F.B.I., Mr. Danchenko said that he first saw the dossier when BuzzFeed published it and that Mr. Steele had exaggerated his statements, portraying uncorroborated gossip and speculation as fact.

The F.B.I. made Mr. Danchenko a paid confidential source and he disclosed his sourcing for the rumors. While he did not provide information substantiating the dossier, the trial has shown that the bureau found his network of contacts valuable for identifying unrelated Russian influence operations in the United States.

The dossier was a dumpster full of flaming partisan garbage from the moment it appeared. Team Hillary’s attempts to get it published prior to the election mostly failed (they did get a piece in a couple of outlets including Mother Jones) but they were much more successful after the election thanks to the decision to brief Trump on the document which in turn gave CNN a reason to report the briefing and that in turn gave Buzzfeed an excuse to publish the entire thing without doing any work to confirm the contents. From that point the media was focused on it for at least a year and eventually just walked away when it turned out it was all junk.

But again, the FBI and CNN and Buzzfeed aren’t on trial here. We’ll know pretty soon if Durham has made his case against Danchenko.