Trump sues over 'extremely distressing' report that led to 'reputational damage'

Former President Donald Trump is suing former MI6 officer Christopher Steele in British court over the infamous dossier he compiled in the course of campaign consultancy for the 2016 presidential election.

Trump is alleging that the report was false, "extremely distressing" to the former president, and caused him unfair "reputational" damage, reportedThe Washington Post on Monday.

In the case submitted to the High Court in London, "Trump denies all of the allegations in the report and is seeking unspecified compensation for inflicting 'personal and reputational damage and distress,'" reported Karla Adam. "Trump’s lawyers said in their filing that he was 'compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing for the Claimant.'"

Steele, who worked as a spy for the U.K., compiled a broad list of claims in the dossier, originally was financed by Republican groups trying to knock Trump out of the primary, but the project was later taken over by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

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Some of its allegations, including that the WikiLeaks email dumps against Democrats in the 2016 election were orchestrated by the Kremlin, were later corroborated. However, many of the more lurid claims in the dossier, particularly that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump with tapes of his "golden showers" at sex parties in Russia, have never been backed up by any evidence.

Trump's suit is not the first time the Steele dossier has been tested in the British legal system; a Russian businessman named in the report, Aleksej Gubarev, sued for defamation over the claims; a judge ruled some of the allegations in the dossier were defamatory but did not hold Steele liable.

In the United States, Trump and his allies have frequently tried to argue that the questionable sourcing of the Steele dossier discredits the entire investigation into his ties to Russia and all of the FBI's actions with regard to investigating or prosecuting members of his campaign. In fact, the FBI had other lines of evidence than the dossier that led them to investigate Trump, primarily the Australian government alerting them that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos had bragged about receiving damaging information on Clinton from the Russians.