Swordsmyth
12-01-2017, 06:43 PM
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has thrown out viral media company BuzzFeed’s argument that their revelation of the infamous Fusion GPS Trump-Russia dossier was part of their “fair reporting privilege.”
BuzzFeed has been slammed with a lawsuit as a result of some of the scandalous and unverified accusations contained in the dossier.
The 35-page dossier, compiled by opposition research firm Fusion GPS and former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele, was unveiled to the public by BuzzFeed in January. The dossier is stuffed with incendiary claims, but the one that got BuzzFeed and Steele in trouble was a claim that Russian billionaire Aleksej Gubarev acted as a Russian intelligence agent to hack into the computers of the US Democratic National Committee.
Gubarev, founder of domain hosting network Webzilla, is suing BuzzFeed for libel in a Florida court. He is also suing Steele for the same charge in London. BuzzFeed argued that they enjoyed “fair reporting privilege” to publish the report as it was part of an ongoing FBI investigation. Therefore, they say, they were not liable in Gubarev’s libel suit because the dossier was posted under accepted journalism practices.
But the Justice Department pointed out that when BuzzFeed published the dossier back in January, they didn’t invoke the FBI probe — and the dossier was compiled by an independent research firm, not a government agency. As such, it isn’t “privileged” information and BuzzFeed is culpable for any wrongdoing the court finds was committed in the act of publishing.
More at: https://www.infowars.com/buzzfeed-cant-dodge-libel-liability-for-dodgy-dossier-doj-finds/
BuzzFeed has been slammed with a lawsuit as a result of some of the scandalous and unverified accusations contained in the dossier.
The 35-page dossier, compiled by opposition research firm Fusion GPS and former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele, was unveiled to the public by BuzzFeed in January. The dossier is stuffed with incendiary claims, but the one that got BuzzFeed and Steele in trouble was a claim that Russian billionaire Aleksej Gubarev acted as a Russian intelligence agent to hack into the computers of the US Democratic National Committee.
Gubarev, founder of domain hosting network Webzilla, is suing BuzzFeed for libel in a Florida court. He is also suing Steele for the same charge in London. BuzzFeed argued that they enjoyed “fair reporting privilege” to publish the report as it was part of an ongoing FBI investigation. Therefore, they say, they were not liable in Gubarev’s libel suit because the dossier was posted under accepted journalism practices.
But the Justice Department pointed out that when BuzzFeed published the dossier back in January, they didn’t invoke the FBI probe — and the dossier was compiled by an independent research firm, not a government agency. As such, it isn’t “privileged” information and BuzzFeed is culpable for any wrongdoing the court finds was committed in the act of publishing.
More at: https://www.infowars.com/buzzfeed-cant-dodge-libel-liability-for-dodgy-dossier-doj-finds/