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Donald Trump at a campaign event in Las Vegas on January 27th: Legal defeat
Photo: Ronda Churchill / REUTERS
According to the so-called Steele dossier, Donald Trump is said to have taken part in orgies in Moscow. There are said to be recordings that made Trump vulnerable to blackmail. To refute these allegations, the former US President filed a civil lawsuit at the London High Court. The court has now dismissed Trump's data protection lawsuit.
The current presidential candidate had sued the London consulting firm Orbis Business Intelligence, whose co-founder is the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Steele wrote the dossier, which, among other things, cites reports that Russian intelligence has footage of Trump's alleged participation in sex parties in Russia.
Judge Karen Steyn now ruled that the case could not proceed. There are therefore no convincing reasons for legal proceedings. Trump also chose "to allow many years to pass - without any attempt to defend his reputation in this jurisdiction - since he first learned of the dossier in January 2017," von Steyn continued.
Controversial allegations
Among other things, the dossier, which was created before the 2016 presidential election, is about an alleged incident in a hotel in 2013, in which prostitutes were said to have urinated on a bed in Trump's presence. According to the dossier, the Russian secret service is supposed to withhold the material as a means of pressure.
Trump is also said to have been courted and supported by Putin's regime for years. In the summer of 2016, his campaign team is said to have colluded with the Russians to damage Hillary Clinton and win the election. According to Steele's informant, the Russian authorities had collected "enough embarrassing material" to be able to blackmail Trump. Trump has always denied all of this. The New York Times also came to the conclusion that there was no solid evidence for many of Steele's statements.
Trump once described Steele's dossier as "completely made up nonsense" that was paid for by Clinton. In fact, it was commissioned by US Democratic advisers. Two years ago, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit in the USA against his former opponent Clinton and other representatives of the Democratic Party.
In the civil lawsuit in London, Trump accused Orbis Business Intelligence of unlawfully using private information. He had demanded compensation for the damage to his reputation - according to Trump, Orbis is said to have violated British data protection laws.
Orbis, however, argued that Trump only filed the lawsuit because of his "longstanding complaints" against the company and Steele. The company also argued for dismissal of the lawsuit on the grounds that the dossier was never intended for the public and was published by the US media company “BuzzFeed” without the permission of Steele or Orbis. The lawsuit was also filed too late.
The so-called Russia affair was the subject of a detailed investigation by the then US special investigator Robert Mueller. After an almost two-year investigation, he confirmed Russian election interventions in favor of Trump. However, he did not find sufficient evidence of illegal agreements between the Trump team and Moscow regarding these interventions.
col/Reuters/AP/AFP