Christopher Steele of Steele dossier fame scores win over Russian oligarchs in court
Former British spy Christopher Steele, whose controversial dossier roiled American politics, scored a major victory Thursday when an appellate court upheld the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit against him by two powerful Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs.
The three-judge District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued its ruling late Thursday, upholding the lower local court’s dismissal of the lawsuit against Steele and his investigative firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Limited, brought by Russians Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan. The Russian investment giants are the ultimate owners of Russia’s Alfa Group and had alleged that Steele had defamed them with his collection of reports about then-candidate Donald J. Trump and his possible ties to Russia.
Steele’s dossier described them on good terms with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and said favors flowed in both directions. The appeals court determined they were sufficiently influential to be considered limited-purpose public figures who have a higher burden of proof to show defamation, and that their entanglement with the Kremlin met the definition of a “preexisting public controversy” that protected Steele’s raw intelligence from being considered defamatory.
Steele remains indirectly entangled in another U.S. suit, one brought in Miami against BuzzFeed by Cyprus-headquartered tech firm XBT and its founder, Aleksej Gubarev. He and his firm, which had operations in South Florida and Texas, were named in the dossier as possible conduits for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, something U.S. law enforcement has since pinned on Russian-led election meddling.
Like the Russian owners of Alfa, Gubarev and XBT are in the process of appealing lower court losses. A series of exhaustive reports by McClatchy and the Miami Herald have shown how major web viruses have spread via XBT’s infrastructure and platforms.
The dossier was compiled by Steele, a former British spy in Moscow, paid for by opponents of candidate Trump on both sides of the political aisle. It became public in January 2017, shortly after Trump’s surprise victory, published in unredacted form by online news site BuzzFeed. Multiple news organizations were in possession of the dossier and trying to verify its contents at the time.
Soon after publication, the Russian businessmen brought the lawsuit against Steel and Orbis, but in August 2018, a lower court dismissed the case. It did so on the grounds that potential involvement in foreign policy by prominent Russian businessmen was a matter of public interest, and that allowing them to seek records from Steele would not show he fabricated his information or that he acted with malice.
Not deterred, the Russians appealed, and the appellate court heard arguments last November.
Through an associate, Steele declined comment Thursday night, although the associate noted that “the champagne is flowing.”
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 7:45 PM.
