Three Russian oligarchs named in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and flawed dossier lost their appeal in their defamation lawsuit against the former MI6 agent.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Thursday upheld the August 2018 dismissal from a judge for D.C.’s Superior Court, issuing a 41-page opinion throwing out the lawsuit brought by three Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan, against Steele’s private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
Steele’s dossier accused the three owners of Russia’s Alfa Bank of having close connections to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian trio said Steele defamed them in his anti-Trump election reports.
The dossier, which repeatedly misspells “Alfa” as “Alpha,” claims a “top level Russian official confirms current closeness of Alpha Group – Putin relationship” and that “significant favors continue to be done in both directions” with “Fridman and Even still giving informal advice to Putin, especially on the U.S.” Steele’s dossier claims “the Russian government figure” reported Fridman, Even, and Khan “had their ups and downs” but were “currently on very good terms with Putin.” The three oligarchs deny the claims.
The D.C. appeals court judges found the Russian oligarchs’ legal arguments “unpersuasive” and “affirmed the trial court’s judgment dismissing the case.”
The Russian businessmen had argued Steele’s dossier, originally written as a series of numbered Company Intelligence Reports, contained “facially defamatory statements” and Steele and his company “did not know the unverified, anonymous, inherently harmful accusations in CIR 112 about [them] to be true” when Steele “intentionally” published the allegations.
The appeals court said the superior court had identified a “real, public controversy.” The lower court defined it as “Russian oligarchs’ involvement with the Russian government and its activities and relations around the world including in the United States.” The judges also said they agreed with the lower court’s conclusion that the “U.S. public today continues to have a strong interest in Russia’s relations with the United States and in the political and commercial relationships between Russian oligarchs and the Russian government.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized the DOJ and the FBI in December for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Carter Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s unverified dossier. Declassified footnotes also show the bureau was aware Steele’s source network might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
“According to the allegations in the complaint, Steele and his company were hired to conduct opposition research about candidate Trump and his presidential campaign,” the appeals court ruled. “Perhaps it is fair to infer that Steele was biased against Mr. Trump, whom Steele had been hired by political opponents to investigate and ‘publicly discredit.’ However, this motivation would not necessarily extend to appellants, who were not the ‘target’ of Steele’s research and investigation.”
The appeals court said Thursday that “we affirm the judgment of the Superior Court which granted appellees’ special motion to dismiss.”
The Russian businessman also brought a lawsuit against Steele in the United Kingdom, where the former MI6 agent testified in March that he met with lawyers connected to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election and that one provided him with a now-debunked claim about alleged Trump-Russia collusion as he compiled his dossier.
Michael Sussman and Marc Elias, two top lawyers for the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and the DNC, played an even more significant role in the Trump-Russia investigation than previously known.
Steele testified Sussman provided him with claims about Alfa Bank’s purported ties to Putin during a late July meeting. Those allegations made their way into a mid-September 2016 memo that became part of Steele’s dossier. Shortly after writing that memo, Steele met with Elias, who was the general counsel for Clinton’s campaign and had personally hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 on the campaign’s behalf. Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson hired Steele in June 2016.
For months in 2016, Steele shared with government officials the claim that an Alfa Bank server was a mode of communication for Trump-Russia collusion.
“I’m very clear is that the first person that ever mentioned the Trump server issue, Alfa server issue, was Mr. Sussman,” he told Alfa Bank’s lawyers in March. Steele also said, “I was given the instruction sometime after that meeting by Mr. Simpson” to look into that as part of his dossier investigation and said the Fusion GPS co-founder’s instruction “was absolutely, definitely linked to the server issue.”
Horowitz dismissed the Alfa Bank Trump-Russia collusion claims in his December report on FISA abuse.
Steele was also connected to a lawsuit brought by Aleksej Gubarev, the leader of the Cyprus-based technology firm XBT, who lost his legal effort against BuzzFeed for publishing Steele’s dossier, which claimed XBT might have been involved in hacking the DNC.
Robert Mueller said his special counsel investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
