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Former President Donald Trump is suing former MI6 officer Christopher Steele over his work on the infamous discredited dossier that bears his name.
Trump, 77, is bringing a data protection claim in the United Kingdom against Steele, who formerly ran British intelligence’s Russia desk, and his consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, attorney Tim Lowles said in a statement.
“Proceedings have been issued on behalf of President Donald J. Trump against Orbis Business Intelligence Limited. The claim relates to breaches of UK Data Protection law arising from the inaccurate processing of the President’s personal data by Orbis following the publication of the false ‘Steele Dossier,’” according to Lowles.
“The President’s claim seeks remedies including that the inaccurate data contained within the Steele Dossier be erased or rectified together with the payment of damages,” the statement added.
A two-day hearing is set to begin Oct. 16, the Independent reported, citing a High Court order published Thursday. No other details about the proceeding were immediately available.
The “Steele Dossier” had circulated in political circles throughout the 2016 election campaign before it was published by BuzzFeed News days before Trump took office in 2017.
The file ostensibly documented Trump’s tight ties with Moscow and laid out possible ways the Kremlin could blackmail him.
The most salacious allegation was that Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room where Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed — and that the Russians had a tape of the whole thing.
The initial report was based on anonymous sourcing and was compiled by Fusion GPS, which was contracted for the job by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The information in the file was later used by federal investigators as evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant targeting Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
The 35-page dossier was later publicly disavowed at the highest levels of the FBI, with the bureau’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, telling lawmakers in November 2020 that he would not have approved the Page warrant application had he known the information in the file was inaccurate.
In addition, the primary source for the document, Igor Danchenko, was charged by special counsel John Durham with five counts of making false statements to the FBI about the sourcing in the file, though he was ultimately acquitted.
Steele has kept a low profile since the dossier was published, only occasionally emerging to defend his work.
“What is being called the dossier was actually a series of single-source intelligence reports over a period of time, if you like, almost a running commentary on the election campaign and Russia’s perspective on it — and it comes from the Russian perspective of the telescope if you like,” he told the Oxford Union in March 2022. “The sources were Russian, they were reporting on how Russia saw it, and of course, that may in some cases be rather different than how it was viewed in America at the other end of the telescope.”
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