A London judge has ordered former President Donald Trump to pay a six-figure legal bill of a U.K. company he sued over claims he participated in “sex parties” and gave bribes to Russian officials which his lawyers said harmed his reputation.
Christopher Steele, a former British spy who ran the Secret Intelligence Service’s Russia desk, founded the U.K.-based company Orbis Business Intelligence, which Trump filed a lawsuit against, claiming that the company violated British data protection laws and damaged his reputation.
The former president was ordered to pay $382,000 in legal fees, according to documents that surfaced Thursday, the Associated Press reported.
The disproven dossier, which was created by Steele and indirectly financed by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, alleged the Trump campaign’s cooperation with the Russian government and claimed they had possession of information that Trump partook in sexual activities with sex workers in Moscow.
The dossier was published by BuzzFeed without permission just before Trump’s inauguration in 2017, resulting in a surge of false rumors that later investigations debunked. The Steele dossier contributed to rumors and accusations throughout Trump’s presidency that he had colluded with the Russian government.
Trump “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress” from the allegations in the dossier which were “egregiously inaccurate,” the former president’s attorney Hugh Tomlinson said at a hearing in October.
The judge dismissed the case last month as “bound to fail,” saying that Orbis’s possession of the memos could not inflict distress on Trump.
In his witness statement, Trump reinforced that he brought the lawsuit against Orbis not to destroy the company or drain its finances, but to prove that the allegations in the dossier were false.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Until there is such a judgment, I continue to suffer damage and distress as a result of people wrongfully believing that the data in the dossier is accurate,” Trump said in the statement.
The order comes just before President Joe Biden is set to give his high-stakes State of the Union address Thursday evening, where he will have a chance to distinguish himself from Trump and steer the public away from concerns about his age and mental fitness in an effort to convince voters he is ready for a second term.
