Former President Donald Trump’s escalating legal penalties are a little larger after a judge in the United Kingdom ordered him to pay more than $380,000 to a firm run by Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who penned the infamous 2016 dossier accusing Trump of harboring close ties to the Russians, ABC News reported.
Trump sued Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, in a London court in 2022 over claims that the series of memos known as the “Steele Dossier” harmed his reputation and violated British data privacy laws.
hristopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
But in February, Justice Karen Steyn tossed the suit — without determining whether the allegations in the dossier were true or false — and ordered Trump to compensate Steele for his legal fees.
According to the judge’s order, which was made public Thursday, the judge gave Trump 28 days to execute the payment of GBP 300,000, which equates to roughly $384,000.
Last month Trump was fined a total of $464 million in disgorgement and interest in his civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, and this week he posted a $91 million bond to cover the judgment plus interest in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case while he pursues an appeal.
Neither Trump’s U.K.-based attorney nor Orbis Business Intelligence responded to a request for comment from ABC News.
When it came to light in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office, the so-called Steele dossier landed like a bombshell and sent shockwaves around the world with its salacious allegations about Trump and his supposed ties to Russia.
The central allegations, that Trump conspired with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election and that Russia had compromising information on him, were given a veneer of credibility because they originated from a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, who had a solid reputation.
A series of investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources. They also raise serious questions about the political underpinnings of some key explosive claims about Trump by shedding new light on the involvement of some well-connected Democrats in the dossier, and separate efforts to prod the FBI to investigate ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
These revelations have triggered a reckoning around the Steele dossier, particularly in the wake of two recent indictments secured by John Durham, the special counsel appointed during the Trump administration to investigate the FBI’s Russia probe. Durham alleges that Steele’s primary source, a US-based foreign policy analyst, repeatedly lied to the FBI about where he got his information.
To be clear, multiple US government inquiries uncovered dozens of contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russians, which have since been acknowledged. The candidate himself and his closest advisers even welcomed the Kremlin’s interference in the election. Still, none of it added up to the collusion suggested in Steele’s memos.
In Nov 2021 a Russian expat who was deeply involved in the Steele dossier pleaded not guilty Wednesday to lying to the FBI about who he worked with on the anti-Trump project in 2016.
Prosecutors say Danchenko falsely denied to the FBI that he worked on the project with a former Democratic operative. They say Danchenko also falsely told the FBI multiple times that he worked with a Russian businessman on the project.
The opposition research was paid for with funds from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Durham has used his indictments against Danchenko and a Clinton campaign lawyer to reveal how Democratic operatives were more involved than previously known in Steele’s work and in efforts to have the FBI investigate Trump’s ties to Russia.
The FBI was already investigating by the time Steele and others provided their research to the bureau. That probe was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, who uncovered dozens of secret contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials.
But regarding the most explosive claim from the dossier – that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians – Mueller said there wasn’t enough evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy.
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