Senator John McCain has spent the past year betraying the Republican Party by desperately trying to take down President Donald Trump. Now, this has come back to bite him in a huge way…
The Daily Caller reported that McCain was hit with bad news this week when lawyers for a Russian tech executive suing BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier revealed that a longtime associate of the Arizona senator and two major news outlets are resisting subpoenas seeking their depositions for the case. Lawyers for the executive, Aleksej Gubarev, revealed this in a brief filed in federal court late Wednesday. The lawyers claimed that David Kramer, a former State Department official and McCain associate, “has been seemingly avoiding service” of a deposition subpoena for weeks.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were named as the two media outlets that are challenging deposition subpoenas they have been served as part of the case.
Gubarev’s lawyers are trying to figure out who gave BuzzFeed the infamous dossier, which the website published to much controversy on Jan. 10. The dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, claims that Gubarev and his companies, XBT Holdings and Webzilla, used spam, viruses and porn bots to hack into DNC computer systems. These allegations have been strongly denied by Gubarnev.
The lawyers representing Gubarnev say that identifying BuzzFeed’s source could shed light on whether the news outlet was warned that information in the dossier could be false. Publishing the dossier despite such warnings would show “reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of the information published,” according to the attorneys.
Buzzfeed has stood by it’s decision to publish the dossier, which was financed by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The publication has also refused to identify its dossier source on the grounds that it would violate its First Amendment protections as a news-gathering organization, despite demands from Gubarnev’s lawyers for them to do so.
GUBARNEV’S LAWYERS HAVE ISSUED DEPOSITION SUBPOENAS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE NEW YORKER, MOTHER JONES MAGAZINE, CNN AND YAHOO! NEWS. IT HAS ALSO ISSUED A SUBPOENA TO WILLIAM F.B. O’REILLY, A REPUBLICAN CONSULTANT AND NEWSDAY COLUMNIST WHO WROTE ABOUT BUZZFEED’S DECISION TO PUBLISH THE DOSSIER.
McCain has previously denied giving a copy of the subpoena to Buzzfeed. Gubarnev’s attorneys have said that though the depositions for the news outlets are scheduled to occur throughout November, The Journal and The Times have “indicated their intent to fight the deposition subpoenas” by arguing that are protected as journalists from discussing the issue.