by Matt Palumbo Posted: July 8, 2020
ABritish court ruled against Christopher Steele, the former M16 British intelligence officer and anti-Trump dossier author who there only seems to exist one stock photo of.
It should’ve been a hint to journalists everywhere that the unverified dossier was bogus when the “failing pile of garbage” Buzzfeed was the first to publish it, but it helped fuel Russia hysteria that still exists among among hysterical factions on the left despite being debunked countless times. Just to illustrate how nonsensical is the Trump-Russia narrative is; as I write, some liberal somewhere is simultaneously arguing that Trump is allied with the Russian government – and also that Russia is paying the Taliban to kill our troops.
While the Mueller investigation ended up proving there was no collusion between Trump and Russia, and the claims in the unverified dossier have remained unverified, we now have a Court’s ruling that Steele didn’t check his facts on at least one issue.
According to John Solomon:
A British judge ruled Wednesday that Christopher Steele violated a data privacy law by failing to check the accuracy of information in his infamous dossier, ordering the former spy’s firm to pay damages to two businessmen he wrongly accused of making illicit payments in Russia.
Justice Mark Warby of the High Court of England and Wales ordered Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to pay a modest 18,000 English pounds – about $22,596 in American currency – each to Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman as compensation for a violation of Britain’s Data Protection Act 1998
Warby ruled that while Steele had a national security interest to share his intelligence with U.S. and British authorities, several of the allegations in Memo 112 of the Steele dossier were “inaccurate or misleading as a matter of fact.”
The judge ruled Steele violated the law by failing to aggressively check the accuracy of one claim accusing Aven and Fridman of making illicit payments to Russia President Vladimir Putin before distributing it to various U.S. and British figures, including the FBI.
This is just the latest claim from Steele’s dossier to be proven bogus. The Mueller report established that a number of its components were bogus, including the infamous “golden showers” allegation, the allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, the allegation that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with Russians, and the hilariously unbelievable allegation that Carter Page was nearly bribed by the Russians to the tune of $8 billion in stock.
As the Judge puts it, Steele’s allegations “clearly call for closer attention, a more inquiring approach, and more energetic checking.” It wouldn’t have hurt if the media also employed those standards before disseminating conspiracy theories for years.
