Former President Donald Trump has initiated legal proceedings against ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele in the United Kingdom, accusing him of creating and disseminating the infamous dossier that Trump argues is discredited.
The dossier has been widely debated since it came into public view during the 2016 presidential campaign, containing several salacious allegations against Trump, including unverified claims about his ties with Russia.
Steele, once in charge of the Russia desk at British intelligence, along with his consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, is now facing a data protection claim from Trump.
Tim Lowles, an attorney representing Trump, stated, “Proceedings have been issued on behalf of President Donald J. Trump against Orbis Business Intelligence Limited,” The New York Post reports.
The claim is based on alleged “breaches of UK Data Protection law,” arising after Steele reportedly processed Trump’s personal data inaccurately following the public release of the dossier.
Trump’s legal counsel asserts that the claims made in the “Steele Dossier” are false and is demanding remedies including the rectification or erasure of the inaccurate data, coupled with the payment of damages.
The dossier was initially published by BuzzFeed News days before Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and quickly gained notoriety for its allegations.
It claimed, among other things, that Trump had paid prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed in Moscow that had previously been occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama, and that there was a tape of the incident in Russian possession.
The preliminary hearing for this legal battle is scheduled for two days, starting Oct 16, as reported by the Independent, referencing a recently published High Court order.
Specifics regarding the proceeding are still under wraps.
The research firm Fusion GPS compiled the controversial dossier, having been contracted by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, The Post notes.
The contents of the file were later utilized by federal investigators to secure a surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
However, the legitimacy of the information has been questioned, and the dossier was publicly renounced by senior FBI officials.
Former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, even disclosed to legislators in November 2020 that he wouldn’t have sanctioned the warrant application targeting Page if he had known about the inaccuracies present in the dossier.
Moreover, Igor Danchenko, the dossier’s main informant, faced legal consequences for allegedly making false statements to the FBI about the file’s sourcing, but he was eventually acquitted of all five counts.
Steele has remained largely out of the public eye since the publication of the dossier, sporadically emerging to support the integrity of his work.
In a rare appearance at the Oxford Union in March 2022, Steele said, “What is being called the dossier was actually a series of single-source intelligence reports over a period of time, if you like, almost a running commentary on the election campaign and Russia’s perspective on it — and it comes from the Russian perspective of the telescope if you like.”
He clarified that the sources were Russian, providing insights into Russia’s viewpoint on the electoral process, which might differ significantly from the American perspective.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) questioned the legitimacy of Steele’s dossier, characterizing the documentation an “Internet rumor.”
A bipartisan report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence suggested Steele’s material was Russian disinformation.
Moreover, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation concluded with a submission of his report, revealing no conclusive evidence of coordination between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 United States election.
A summarized four-page version of the report, created by Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, was presented to Congress and shared with the public, offering no definitive stance on potential obstruction of justice by Trump.
