Lawyers for a Russian tech executive suing BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier say that a longtime associate of Arizona Sen. John McCain and two major news outlets are resisting subpoenas seeking their depositions for the case.
In a brief filed in federal court late Wednesday, lawyers for the executive, Aleksej Gubarev, claim that David Kramer (pictured below), a former State Department official and McCain associate, “has been seemingly avoiding service” of a deposition subpoena for weeks.
Please see the very curious input Reason.com put out just this July regarding Kramer’s involvement in the Steele dossier getting into the hands of the press.
And The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are challenging deposition subpoenas they have been served as part of the case.
Gubarev’s lawyers are attempting to find out who gave BuzzFeed the salacious dossier, which the website published to much controversy on Jan. 10.
The dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleges that Gubarev and his companies, XBT Holdings and Webzilla, used spam, viruses and porn bots to hack into DNC computer systems. Gubarev vehemently denies the allegations.
Gubarev’s attorneys say that identifying BuzzFeed’s source could shed light on whether the news outlet was warned that information in the dossier could be false. They argue that publishing the dossier despite such warnings would show “reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of the information published.”
BuzzFeed has defended its decision to publish the dossier, which was financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC and commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. It is also resisting demands from Gubarev’s team to identify its dossier source on the grounds that it would violate its First Amendment protections as a news-gathering organization.Via: Daily Caller
Reason had this to say on July 16th on the mystery surrounding how the fake dossier got into the hands of Buzzed:
Did John McCain and a controversial D.C. lobbying group conspire to get the infamous “pee dossier” into the hands of the press?
A lawsuit making its way through court in the UK hopes to determine just what role the senator and his associates had in making the lurid dossier public.
New filings in the lawsuit, obtained by McClatchy, detail how David Kramer—employed by the nonprofit and purportedly non-political McCain Institute—acted as a representative of McCain in the Arizona senator’s dealings on sensitive intelligence measures:
According to a new court document in the British lawsuit, counsel for defendants Steele and Orbis repeatedly point to McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal Trump critic, and a former State Department official as two in a handful of people known to have had copies of the full document before it circulated among journalists and was published by BuzzFeed. Read more: McClatchy
It also reveals that McCain was one of a just few people with whom the dossier’s author, ex-British spy Christopher Steele, shared a copy of his final findings. So how did they get from there to publication in Buzzfeed?
