Whether you call it the swamp, the deep state or the Washington, DC establishment, it was definitely out to get Trump following the 2016 election. He wasn’t supposed to win and he had angered some of the wrong people.
How else can this be explained? The Russian collusion conspiracy that Democrats and their media allies have obsessed over for the last two years was fueled in large part by the Steele dossier. It’s sad to learn that someone associated with John McCain played a role in this.
A businessman named in the dossier filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed for being named in the initial report, but a judge ruled in BuzzFeed’s favor.
Chuck Ross reports at the Daily Caller:
Breaking: John McCain Associate Gave Dossier to BuzzFeedA longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday.David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on Jan. 10, 2017.The disclosure was made as part of a final report ahead of Ungaro’s ruling in favor of BuzzFeed in a defamation lawsuit.The revelation that Kramer was BuzzFeed’s source settles one of the main mysteries of the dossier, which alleges a vast conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government to influence the 2016 election…McCain dispatched Kramer to London to meet with Steele. After that Nov. 28, 2016 encounter, Kramer obtained a copy of the dossier from Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.Kramer met Nov. 30, 2016, with McCain and McCain’s chief of staff, Christopher Brose, to review Steele’s reports.
Zoe Tillman of BuzzFeed has more on the lawsuit and the judge’s ruling:
BuzzFeed News Has Won A Lawsuit Over Its Decision To Publish The Trump DossierA federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News over the publication of a dossier in January 2017 that alleged several years of links between Russia and then–president-elect Donald Trump.A Cypriot businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, was named in the dossier, and his name wasn’t redacted in the version originally published by BuzzFeed. Gubarev sued shortly after the article came out, claiming he was defamed by having his name included.US District Judge Ursula Ungaro in Florida found that BuzzFeed News was shielded against defamation claims because the dossier was the subject of official proceedings — both Trump and then-president Barack Obama had been briefed on it, according to reporting at the time, and the FBI investigated allegations in the documents. The judge concluded that BuzzFeed News was protected by what’s known as the “fair report” privilege.Ungaro also found that the BuzzFeed News article was “fair and true” because it just reproduced the dossier — it didn’t express any opinions about it.
Here’s a statement from BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith:
This entire Russian affair was so obviously a set-up from the beginning. I can’t believe it’s still a subject of inquiry in our government and a nightly topic on cable news.
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