Donald Trump never paid $380,000 a British court said he owed over the 'golden showers' dossier, former spy says
Trump has not complied with a British court order to pay $380,000 in legal fees, said a former spy.
The fees stem from Trump's lawsuit against ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
Steele's dossier alleged Trump-Russia ties. Trump called it a "pile of garbage."
Donald Trump has failed to comply with a British High Court order to pay $380,000 in legal fees and has also ignored an offer to settle with a former British spy who compiled a document that claimed Russia had interfered in the 2016 US election, Sky News reported.
Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, produced a report commissioned by the Democratic National Convention and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that made a series of mostly unsubstantiated allegations.
The most salacious claim in the dossier alleged that prostitutes visited Trump in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, and they performed an act of urination in front of him, a practice known as '"golden showers."
Trump has dismissed the claims as a "pile of garbage," saying that the Steele dossier contained numerous inaccuracies and breached his rights under the Data Protection Act.
The former president sued Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence, in the UK earlier this year, but the case was dismissed because it was filed after the six-year limitation period.
Trump was ordered to pay £300,000 ($380,000) in legal fees, said Steele in a tweet, on Friday.
Neither the Trump campaign nor Trump's office responded to a request for comment.
Thus far, Trump has only paid £10,000 ($12,700), ahead of the hearing as a security payment. This was transferred to Steele in February.
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.
— Christopher Steele (@Chris_D_Steele) June 7, 2024
Speaking to Sky News, Steele said, "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."
Neither the Trump campaign nor Trump's office immediately responded to Business Insider's request for comment.
"I think he's trying to put off a lot of these legal cases and these fines and these costs until after what he thinks will be his reelection in November, in which case he will just tell us all to go and jump," Steele told Sky News.
It is the latest in Trump's legal battles coming after the former president and GOP presumptive nominee was found guilty of charges relating to a hush-money payment made to the porn star Stormy Daniels at the end of May.
The Steele dossier consisted of 16 separate reports that total 35 pages. It was leaked to and published by BuzzFeed in 2017 and alleged collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia.
In 2022, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether hiding payments to Steele had breached federal campaign finance laws.
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