Former President Donald Trump is suing British ex-spy Christopher Steele over the discredited Steele Dossier that was intended to paint a picture of alleged collusion between Trump and Russia.
The lawsuit was filed by lawyers for Trump in London and says that Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultant group founded by Steele, violated British data protection laws.
In a written witness statement, Trump said that “not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated.”
Funds from Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee went toward Steele’s dossier, which made claims tying Trump to Russia that were later discredited.
In his statement, Trump said that the dossier had “numerous false, phony or made-up allegations,” including wild claims of “sex parties” in St. Petersburg, and that Russia did not have “sufficient material to blackmail” him.
“The only way that I can fully demonstrate the total inaccuracies of the personal data in the dossier is to bring these proceedings and to prove, by evidence at trial, that the data are false,” Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, said.
The dossier claimed to establish a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump’s campaign and Russia, an allegation that was not backed up by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the collusion claims.
Trump’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson said that the former president “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress” because of the dossier, which contained “shocking and scandalous claims.”
Antony White, a lawyer for Orbis, said that the case should be thrown out because too much time had passed and that BuzzFeed News was not supposed to publish the dossier.
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White claimed that Trump has “a long history of repeatedly bringing frivolous, meritless and vexatious claims for the purpose of vexing and harassing perceived enemies and others against whom he bears a grudge.”
Trump previously tried to sue former top FBI officials and Clinton over the dossier, but his lawsuit was rejected by a federal judge.
According to a report from special counsel Robert Durham, the FBI had offered to pay Steele up to $1 million for evidence linking Trump to Russia and paid Steele’s primary subsource hundreds of thousands of dollars even after the source was unable to provide evidence for any of his claims.