Trump has a longstanding habit of just walking away from his commitments whenever he thinks the people he owes can't or won't do anything about it - even when he loses in court.
Donald Trump is in trouble again and this time in the UK. Reportedly, he has failed to pay £300K to a former spy after losing a case against him in a British High Court.
Donald Trump’s road to November’s election is getting rockier by the day. After his guilty verdict in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, his potential departure to jail is still in question. Just when he was dealing with this new blow, claims of his racist behaviour on The Apprentice have resurfaced.
And looks like that isn’t enough. The former POTUS is understood to be in trouble again but this time in the UK. Reportedly, he has failed to pay a former spy £300K after losing a court battle against him.
Donald Trump fails to pay £300K legal costs to former MI6 spy
The 77-year-old has failed to comply with a UK High Court order that instructed him to pay £300,000 in legal costs to former spy, Christopher Steele. The former MI6 agent compiled a dossier alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The largely discredited dossier was commissioned by Trump's political opponents including Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They hired the former British intelligence officer Steele to carry out the research in 2016.
According to Newsweek, it contained unverified intelligence reports about Trump’s relationship with Russia. Many Russian experts have dismissed it. Trump sued Steele’s company Orbis Business Intelligence and lost the case in London High Court earlier this year. The court ordered him to pay an initial £300,000 ($381,000) in legal fees, which the GOP leader is in breach of. Taking to X (formerly Twitter) Steele wrote on Friday:
Earlier this year, when he lost his English High Court case against us, the judge ordered Donald Trump to pay Orbis an initial £300k in costs. Trump, who claims to respect the UK, has now been in breach of this order for two months and faces enforcement if he travels here again.
Trump - who may also have to face international travel restrictions after his historic conviction - did pay £10,000 to the court as security against costs ahead of the hearing on a Judge’s order. This amount was transferred to Steele in February.
Christopher Steele reveals Trump’s breach of UK court order
Despite Trump owning assets in the UK, Steele cannot obtain his money through them. Trump’s extensive British assets also include the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland but it is owned by a Trump Organization subsidiary. Steele told Sky News:
"The fact is we were awarded a £300,000 initial cost order in February, which was confirmed when his right of appeal was turned down at the end of March. And so he's been in breach of that order for two months now."
"Cost is the key issue in all litigation, and particularly in what we call lawfare, which we think this is. It is an attempt to take vengeance against us or to keep us quiet."
Steele claimed that Trump is intentionally trying to ‘put off’ a lot of his legal cases until what he thinks would be his re-election in November so that he can then ‘tell us all to go and jump, basically.’ If Trump doesn’t settle, Steele’s only option would seek repayment in the US - which would incur more costs.
BTW, don't forget, Steele has said - on the record - that while it was never verifed, The Pee Tape "probably does exist".
Confronting his critics, Christopher Steele defends controversial dossier in first major interview
The British ex-spy opens up in the ABC News documentary "Out of the Shadows."
Former British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to "set the record straight" about his bombshell dossier for the first time since his name splashed across headlines in early 2017, defending his work, his name, and the decision to include some of its most controversial elements.
George Stephanopoulos sits down with former MI6 spy Christopher Steele for his first interview since the publication of intelligence reports now known as the "Steele dossier."
"I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it," Steele told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in the forthcoming documentary, "Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier" -- an exclusive preview of which aired Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
In his first major interview, Steele described how and why he wrote the 17 reports that made up the so-called "Steele dossier," which accused former President Donald Trump's campaign of conspiring with the Russians to tilt the result of the 2016 election.
Steele’s dossier has come under immense scrutiny since its release. And yet in many ways, it proved prescient. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton.
- more -
No comments:
Post a Comment