(London) His controversial report on Donald Trump’s supposed links with Russia, including the existence of a sexual video involving the former US president, sparked a political storm in 2017: a former British spy faces Monday at the courts in London.
The former American president, again a candidate for the Republican nomination for the next presidential election, is suing Christopher Steele, 59, and the private intelligence company Orbis, founded by this former agent of the British intelligence services, on behalf of data protection law.
Commissioned by the Democratic camp during the campaign for the 2016 American election, Christopher Steele compiled raw, unverified intelligence linking Donald Trump to Russia.
“President Trump is opening this case because he is seeking to assert his legal rights […] that the statements contained in these memoranda are false,” his lawyer Hugh Tomlinson told the hearing at the High Court in London.
He targets in particular two notes from this report which describe alleged orgies in which Donald Trump allegedly participated in St. Petersburg, as well as others with prostitutes in Moscow.
If the former American president recognizes that the consulting company Orbis is not responsible for the publication of the report, he believes that it is she who “processed” the data contained in the report.
For their part, lawyers for the Orbis company requested that the lawsuits launched according to them be dropped for the sole purpose of “harassing Orbis and Mr. Steele and maintaining old grievances.”
According to them, their clients “are not responsible” for possible damage to Donald Trump’s reputation caused by the publication of the report without their knowledge.
Published by the Buzzfeed website ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, it made numerous compromising allegations about the former US president, including suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “supported and directed” an operation to “raise” Donald Trump’s candidacy for the American presidential election for “at least five years”.
Some of the report’s findings fueled special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation, which, after two years on the matter, concluded that there was evidence of Russian interference in the election campaign, but not of collusion with Russia. Donald Trump’s team.
The hearings are scheduled to continue Tuesday.