A federal judge in South Florida has asked the Dutch government for help in putting two bankers under oath in connection with a lawsuit involving the so-called Trump dossier.
In a decision on Friday, which wasn’t available in court records until Monday, Judge Ursula Ungaro in Miami granted a request by the news site BuzzFeed and its founder Ben Smith to seek help from a court in The Hague.
The request would compel testimony from two Dutch bank employees, one from BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions and another from Der Lage Lande. BuzzFeed lawyers argue the testimony is needed since it is being sued for alleged damages due to its publication of the dossier in January 2017.
That dossier, actually a series of evolving business-intelligence memos compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, went on to become part of the basis for U.S. congressional and judicial probes into possible collusion between the Kremlin and Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
BuzzFeed was hit by multiple defamation suits after publishing the document in January 2017, including one from Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael D. Cohen. He withdrew his suit last week, days after federal agents raided his home and offices.
The request by BuzzFeed for Dutch testimony came in the defamation suit brought in federal district court in Miami by XBT Holdings and Webzilla Inc. as well as the head of those companies, Alexsej Gubarev.
The dossier alleged, without substantiation, that Gubarev cooperated with the Russian government because it had compromising information about him. It also alleged, as raw business intelligence, that his companies, through porn traffic, were used to spread computer viruses and other malware to steal data from and conduct attacks against the Democratic National Committee.
The day after the dossier’s release, Gubarev strongly denied the accusations to McClatchy and has maintained that position. He is the controlling shareholder in XBT, which is based in Luxembourg but run out of Cyprus, and has seven subsidiaries, including Webzilla. It has a complicated ownership structure, and its business model includes servers and web hosting.
Lawsuits are still being filed in connection with the dossier: Three Russian oligarchs on Friday brought a new suit against Steele in Washington, D.C. And the Democratic National Committee on April 20 filed suit against Russia, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks , alleging there was a conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections.
In seeking testimony from the Dutch bankers, BuzzFeed in an April 13 brief pointed to claims by Gubarev’s lawyers that negative publicity that came from the companies’ being cited in the dossier led to frozen bank accounts and heightened bank scrutiny. Emails from the lenders were entered into evidence in the case.
“The requested testimony and documents are relevant to assess Plaintiff’s allegations that their relationships with lenders and potential business partners were damaged,” read BuzzFeed’s motion seeking the overseas testimony.
Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, added Monday that the “lawsuits against BuzzFeed over the Steele dossier have never been about the merits of our decision to publish it. If there's one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on today, it's that the dossier was an important part of the government's investigation into potential collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia. Its interest to the public is, and always has been, obvious.”
Representatives of Gubarev and XBT had no immediate comment.
Kevin G. Hall: 202-383-6038, @KevinGHall