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Christopher Steele reveals why Donald Trump has failed to pay $380K in legal fees after losing UK dossier case
Donald Trump has declined to comply with a UK High Court order requiring him to pay £300,000 in legal expenses.
After becoming the first former or current president in the history of the United States to get convicted in a criminal case, Donald Trump has declined to comply with a UK High Court order requiring him to pay £300,000 ($380,000) in legal expenses.
The GOP leader has also rejected a formal offer to settle with Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent who prepared a dossier claiming Russian intervention in the 2016 US election.
This puts the former US President in contempt of the British High Court, which dismissed his effort to sue Steele's company Orbis Business Intelligence in February. Orbis issued a formal settlement offer in March, but Trump's lawyers are yet to respond after months.
During the campaign of the 2016 presidential election, Trump's political rivals, including Hillary Clinton, commissioned Steele, a former chief of MI6's Russia desk, to create the document.
According to the ex-MI6 officer, the violation increases the possibility of a re-elected Trump travelling to the United Kingdom as the US President after refusing to make payments and “treating our legal system with contempt”. He went on to say that Trump must face "enforcement" if he re-visits the UK.
Christopher Steele reveals why Trump has been violating order?
Speaking to Sky News, Steele said, “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.” Trump has been violating that injunction for the past two months, he said.
Calling cost the most important factor in every litigation, he asserted that it is an attempt to take “vengeance against us or to keep us quiet.”
“We're talking about perhaps the next president of the US here, who is running for office and claims to love and respect the UK, and in fact is treating our legal system with contempt,” he said.
He further claimed that the former US President has been attempting to postpone many of these legal issues, fines, and costs until after “what he thinks will be his re-election in November, in which case he will just tell us all to go jump, basically.”
Taking to X, Steele wrote: “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.”
The former US President has so far paid the court £10,000 as surety against legal fees ahead of the hearing. This was given to Steele in February.
Trump argued that the Steele report, which included unfounded charges of bribery and salacious assertions that he employed sex workers during his stay in Moscow, was full of error and violated his Data Protection Act rights.
