It’s difficult to navigate Donald Trump’s various legal cases. British justice rejected, this Thursday, February 1, the prosecution brought by the former American president against the ex-British spy Christopher Steele, whose controversial report on his supposed links with Russia had caused a political storm in 2017. The candidate for the Republican nomination for the American presidential election had seized the High Court in London in the name of the law on data protection concerning this document, which compiled raw, unverified information and notably mentioned a supposed video of a sexual nature.
The former president, aged 77, had brought this action against the private intelligence company of the former British spy, Orbis Business Intelligence, and claimed compensation for moral damage. “There are no convincing reasons” which would justify holding a trial, ruled the British High Court on Thursday, because “whatever the merits of the assertion […] the request for compensation or payment of damages is doomed to failure”. According to Judge Karen Steyn, Donald Trump was not able to “formulate a viable appeal which would have a real chance of succeeding […] and chose to let many years pass”, which makes him say that the former president was mainly seeking to “defend his reputation” through this action.
Published by the Buzzfeed website ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, this report cited numerous compromising allegations about the former American president, including the existence – never confirmed – of a sexual video involving prostitutes and filmed during Donald Trump’s trip to Moscow. Commissioned by the Democratic camp during the campaign for the 2016 American election, Christopher Steele compiled raw, unverified intelligence linking Donald Trump to Russia. Some of his discoveries fueled the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller who, after two years on this matter, concluded that there was evidence of Russian interference in the electoral campaign but not that of “Russian- Trumpian.”
A lying report for Donald Trump
“President Trump is opening this case because he is seeking to assert his legal rights […] on the fact that the statements contained in these memoranda are false”, his lawyer Hugh Tomlinson said at the hearing in mid-January at the High Court in London. He was particularly targeting two notes in this report which describe the alleged orgies allegedly attended by Donald Trump in St. Petersburg, as well as others with prostitutes in Moscow. If the former US president, who was not present at the hearing, acknowledges that the consulting company Orbis was not responsible for the publication of the report, he estimated that it was she who “processed” the data contained in the report.
Separately, the report also cited exchanges of information for nearly a decade with the Kremlin and suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “supported and directed” an operation to “raise” Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. American for “at least five years”. Christopher Steele had previously transmitted it to the FBI, which had relied on certain passages to put relatives of the Republican billionaire under surveillance.
Fanciful accusations
Donald Trump called this report false, while an investigation by the daily The New Tork Times had shown that there was no evidence to support the assertions it contained. In November 2021, Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst and former consultant to the renowned think tank Brooking Institutions, was charged with perjury for lying to FBI investigators about the sources provided to Christopher Steele for his report. He is accused of having invented everything. Except that Igor Danchenko got his “explosive” information from a close friend… of the Clintons, Charles Dolan. The latter actively participated in Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
In October 2020, a defamation complaint from Russian businessman Alexei Gubarev, cited in the same report, was rejected by the British courts, which ruled that if the references to Alexei Gubarev were indeed defamatory, he was not had not been able to prove that the ex-spy was responsible for their publication. In his testimony given at the proceedings, Christopher Steele then affirmed that he had never intended to disclose the information in question and that if he had known, he would have done “everything that was in order his) power to prevent it”. A “Russiagate” that makes you sputter.