Sued in Britain’s High Court for defamation, 56-year-old former MI6 agent Christopher Steele confessed that his dossier was never meant to go public, something done when BuzzFeed published it Jan. 10, 2017. Bringing suit against Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence, Alekjsej Gubarev told Justice Mark Warby that Steele defamed him, accusing him of involvement with hacking the Democrat National Committee’s emails in 2016. Gubarev’s lawyer, Evan Andrew Caldecott QC, seeks unspecified damages from Steele for implicating his client in an infamous hacking scandal that tipped the 2016 U.S. presidential election in 74-year-old President Donald Trump’s favor over his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Steele already admitted to Warby’s court April 24 that he destroyed all source material in 2017 related to claims he made in the dossier.
Destroying evidence should be reason enough in his defamation suit to rule against Steele. For the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency [NSA] and former Obama White House, Steele’s scrubbing of his source material invalidates any of his unverified, unproven and salacious charges made in his dossier. When the late Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) gave the Steele dossier to former FBI Director James Comey in July 2016, McCain and Comey knew the contents were rubbish, purely defamatory opposition research paid by Hillary and the DNC. Yet Comey proceeded to use the Steele Dossier as probable cause or predicate to open up and counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign, presenting Steele’s unproven allegations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] Court to obtain warrants to wiretap Trump campaign officials.
Recently declassified notes of 50-year-old former FBI Agent Peter Strzok proved there here was no known contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence. Yet Comey went full steam ahead getting warrants from the FISA Court to wiretap Trump’s campaign. Trump fired Comey May 9, 2017 precisely for leaking to the New York Times and Washington Post, but, more importantly, for conducting an illegal counterintelligence investigation. When you consider that Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein appointed 75-year-old former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel May 17, 2017 to investigate Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow, months after Strzok’s memo cleared Trump or his campaign, the 22-month, $40 million Special Counsel investigation looks like a complete farce. Steele’s admission April 24 that he destroyed his underlying evidence, tells the whole story.
British High Court Judge Mark Warby should find Steele guilty of defamation, not buying his argument that the dossier was not intended for public viewing. If Steele did his job, he would have preserved the confidentiality of the document. Leaking it to BuzzFeed shows that Steele, or some connected to FusionGPS, wanted the material out for public consumption. “It is not in Orbis’s interest for any our intelligence work to be aired in the media or public domain, especially in raw or unanalyzed form,” Steele said in a witness statement, denying any responsibility for defaming Gubarev. Steele’s argument must be predicated on retaining source material to the dossier, something he claims he destroyed in 2017. Steele insists that Orbis does everything possible to protect its confidential sources, certainly not risk exposing his sources to the public when the dossier leaked to the press.
Steele insists that any disclosure of confidential information contained in his dossier would potentially compromise his sources, ruining his intelligence business. “If these are exposed to the world, no-one will contact Orbis to do discreet work on their behalf,” Steele said, making a point he’s not responsible for the alleged defamation. “I would therefore be professionally ruinous—and also morally repugnant—for us to do anything that could risk exposing a source, especially in a ruthless, lawless place like Russia, as a result of any such especially media exposure,” Steele said. Steele’s argument that it would hurt his business to defame Gubarev or anyone named in the documents makes no sense. Steele decided to protect his sources by purging all his files in 2017, erasing everything, most likely because much of the underlying source material was fabricated by Steele.
Justice Mark Warby must reject completely Steele’s argument didn’t intend his dossier to go public. Writing the dossier for Hillary’s use against Trump was precisely for the purpose of leaking to the press, drip-by-drip. BuzzFeed disseminated Steele’s dossier to every media outlet looking to use it to gain an advantage against Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Steele knew that Glen Simpson’s Fusion GPS would be shopping around the dossier to the highest bidder. When he went to Perkins Coie Law Firm representing the DNC, Steele knew the dossier would be disseminated widely, not protected under any confidentiality agreement. Gubarev’s Atty. Caldecott argued to Justice Warby that Steele was responsible for maintaining the privacy of the dossier. Warby said Steele had not take reasonable steps to verify allegations or safeguard data privacy in the dossier smearing Gubarev.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
