The courts, rather than Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley and House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes, will be next to drop bombshells concerning the Steele dossier, explains Margot Cleveland of The Federalist.
Rather, the next big information burst will likely come during the course of Aleksej Gubarev’s twin libel lawsuits, one against the dossier’s author, former British MI6 spy Steele, and the second against BuzzFeed, the online media outlet that first ran Steele’s opposition research in its entirety, and its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith.
In his lawsuits, Gubarev, who emigrated from Russia to Cyprus in 2002, claims Steele defamed him by stating that his companies, XBT Holding S.A. and its Florida-based subsidiary, Webzilla, hacked the Democratic Party by “using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations.’” While Gubarev’s lawsuits focus on only a sliver of the Steele dossier, to prove his case—especially against BuzzFeed, which as a U.S. media outlet is protected from liability absent malice—Gubarev needs details.
BuzzFeed needs details as well, because it seeks to avoid liability based on a so-called “Fair Report Privilege” which, according to BuzzFeed, grants “the press (and others) the right to republish allegedly defamatory statements, . . . as long as they were made within the context of government activities.” Accordingly, to (respectively) prosecute and defend the civil claims, Gubarev and BuzzFeed need information from both those responsible for compiling and distributing the Steele dossier and those in the government who used the information.
Click here to read the full report.
Earlier this month, conservative watchdog Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department for records connecting Bruce and Nellie Ohr to Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.
Steele has admitted in court that the discredited document contains “limited intelligence.”
Steele also admitted part of “his final December memo,” was unvetted.
“Such intelligence was not actively sought; it was merely received,” Steele added.
According to a recent WSJ report, the Obama Justice Department relied on information obtained by Steele, to spy on Trump campaign aide, Carter Page, during the final days of the 2016 presidential election.
Steele infamously compiled the discredited dossier detailing alleged sex acts performed by then-businessman Donald Trump inside a swanky Moscow hotel suite in 2013.
