“Out of the ordinary” doesn’t even begin to describe the fact-finding mission facing lawyers in the defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed for publishing an unverified intelligence dossier on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court by a Russian businessman accused in the dossier of hacking into Democratic Party leaders’ computers, implicates questions that are the night-and-day obsession of government investigators, the White House press corps and plenty of American citizens. Because truth is a defense in defamation litigation, defense attorneys in the case are trying to verify what’s in the dossier through any means necessary, including issuing subpoenas to the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
