The Cost of the Lawfare Surrounding the Steele Dossier Will Vastly Outstrip Its Original Cost
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Yesterday, Reuters reported that Fusion GPS has told Congress (presumably as part of the settlement on a bank subpoena reached last week) how much it got paid for the dossier on Donald Trump, and how much of that it paid Christopher Steele for his part in the dossier. Fusion got $1.02 million from Perkins Coie, of which Steele got $168K.
Fusion GPS’ statement said it had told Congress about how $168,000 was paid last year to Orbis Business Intelligence, Steele’s company.
The money paid to Orbis was taken from $1.02 million it received in fees and expenses from the Perkins Coie law firm, the statement said.
There’s some confusion about this number, however, with some claiming that Fusion had a huge markup on Steele’s labor. But that’s not right. We’ve now confirmed what we’ve seen is just part of the total dossier Fusion did on Trump. If the numbering in the dossier is any indication, there were at least 166 reports done, with 79 done between the time started on the dossier in April and when Steele got involved in June. Of the total, we’ve seen just 17 released reports from Steele, or about 10% of the total (assuming none of his Russian-related reports were withheld). That would put his payment — over 16% of what Fusion got paid — to be a reasonable fraction (of course much of the rest of the dossier is likely domestic and less reliant on paid sources built up over decades).
In any case, as Reuters points out, it’s far less than the $12 million Trump has alleged.
But it’s also far less than what the dossier will cost in the long run. As I’ve been tracking, there are a number of strands of “lawfare” surrounding the dossier — Russian and Republican attempts to use lawsuits to make the dossier toxic. They include:
- Alexej Gubarev’s lawsuit against Steele and his company in the UK
- Alexej Gubarev’s lawsuit against BuzzFeed in FL (with related subpoena challenges being litigated in DC)
- The lawsuit by Alfa Bank executives against BuzzFeed in DC (filed after consulting with top GOP lawyers Viet Dinh and Brian Benczkowski and their firm)
- Fusion’s efforts to fight testimony and bank subpoenas in DC
- Carter Page’s lawsuit against HuffPo and Yahoo
In addition, I would be shocked if Marc Elias doesn’t get slapped with a lawsuit or two, now that his role in funding the dossier has become known. With the exception of Page’s suit, each of those involves at least two sets of well paid lawyers to fight things out.
Which is to say that the lawfare surrounding the dossier may well end up costing $12 million, even assuming no one ever has to pay any penalties. Which seems to offer a lesson for sleazy politicos: If you’re going to pay to develop dirt on your opponent, make sure that the blowback from it doesn’t cost more in terms of dollars and damage than the actual dossier itself.
o. t. but relevant:
https://apnews.com/3bca5267d4544508bb523fa0db462cb2/Hit-list-exposes-Russian-hacking-beyond-US-elections
associated press does not have a high reputation with me, but this research deserves some attention.
“…..
But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.
That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.
Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.
He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.
The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET …
… The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.
Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in… ”
folks who know more than i know will have to evaluate this particulat set of facts, but in general it seems very clear that the russian use/abuse of the internet, operating systems, facebook, twitter, and google/utube to steal information and influence political opinions at the level of individual citizens in the u. s. and europe is a new and dangerously destabalizing elections technology.
related –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-anatomy/?
“… Ad spending linked to the Internet Research Agency makes up only a fraction of the total spending on Facebook during the 2016 election cycle, and it’s unclear what impact these ads had…”
soon, i hope, these notions of “fraction of the total spending” or a fraction of the total ads are understood to be completely irrelevant when you are dealing with targeted messages. if i target messages on getting citizens in the two states texas and california to support succession from the u. s., as was done this last year, it does not matter a whit if the per cent of my messages is one billionth or one trillionth of the total messages sent or of the total political messages, likewise for gross sums spent.
Or to use a business analogy, make sure that the legal costs from defending yourself do not exceed the profit derived – in the political case, the damage you can do to an opponent – from the unseemly or illegal conduct for which you are sued.
“Lawfare”, other than as a blog name, is a silly term. It is charged, but with no actual meaning, much like “collusion”. And if people want to come for Marc, let them. That will not end well for any potential plaintiff.