The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump took an old fight and dragged it into a London courtroom. He sued Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm behind the Steele dossier, in a data-protection case over memoranda he said contained false personal information about him. The strategy did not erase the material he wanted challenged. It put the dispute in front of a judge, under court rules, where the question became what the law would allow rather than what Trump wanted the public to believe.

The timing mattered. The hearing took place on October 16, 2023, but the judgment did not come until February 1, 2024. That gap is part of the story: this was not a quick clean-up of a political mess, but a slow legal fight that kept the dossier in view while the case worked its way through court.

When the ruling arrived, it went badly for Trump. The High Court refused his application to amend the claim form to add a claim under the Data Protection Act 1998. It also struck out parts of the pleaded case and granted Orbis summary judgment on the claim under Civil Procedure Rule 24.2. The judge’s conclusion was that Trump had no real prospect of obtaining the remedy he wanted.

What the court did not do is just as important. It did not decide whether the dossier allegations were true or false. It did not turn the case into a merits finding on the underlying claims in the memoranda. Instead, it ended the lawsuit on procedural and remedy grounds. In other words, Trump brought the document back into the spotlight, but the court did not give him the definitive public vindication he was after. It closed the case without answering the broader political question he wanted answered.