Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy behind the explosive Trump-Russia dossier, has spent the past year as a sort of Robert Mueller-level enigma—the type of news-cycle luminary who is ubiquitously invoked, but never seen or heard. That changed, sort of, on Monday, when Steele submitted to a deposition in London as part of a lawsuit filed by a Russian technology mogul, Aleksej Gubarev, who says that BuzzFeed defamed him by not redacting his name when the Web site published the dossier in January 2017. It was, by all accounts, the first time Steele spoke about the dossier in an official, on-the-record capacity, which would seem to render newsworthy anything and everything he said during the hours-long deposition.

Alas, it also appears that until the BuzzFeed trial kicks off in a Miami courtroom this November, only the lawyers will have the dish on Steele’s dish. Attorneys for both BuzzFeed and Gubarev wouldn’t discuss anything about Monday’s proceedings, which took place under a broad protective order that neither side wanted to risk violating by answering even mundane questions about, say, how long each set of attorneys grilled Steele, or how many people were in the room, or even what Steele was wearing. Reached through a spokesman shortly after the deposition wrapped, Gubarev’s lead counsel, Val Gurvits, would only say, “I can confirm that the deposition took place today as scheduled, that Mr. Steele appeared, was professional and congenial, and that we are satisfied with the results of the deposition. I cannot, however, give you any details regarding Mr. Steele‘s testimony because his entire testimony was designated as confidential by his legal team.” (Steele’s U.S.-based attorney, Christy Eikhoff, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment.) As I reported earlier this month, the plaintiffs rented a London office space to host the deposition, for which they were expecting at least 20 attendees. Steele was to be videotaped responding to questions submitted in advance by attorneys from both sides, who were allotted up to seven hours for the grilling.

Steele’s sworn verbal testimony is expected to become public when it is entered into the BuzzFeed trial later this year. The downside, for all those who devoured the dossier and its many jaw-dropping claims after BuzzFeed made the controversial decision to publish the unverified document, is that a judge ruled that Steele’s testimony had to be limited to the brief passage at issue in Gubarev’s lawsuit. In that section, toward the very end of the dossier, Steele’s sources allege that Gubarev’s Web-hosting firm “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and ‘conduct altering operations’ against the Democratic party leadership,” and that Gubarev was “recruited under duress” by Russian agents. Gubarev vigorously denies those claims, and he wants BuzzFeed to compensate him for up to $130 million in financial damages that he claims to have incurred. (Steele is separately being sued for defamation, even though he did not publish the dossier himself.) BuzzFeed, which subsequently redacted Gubarev’s name and apologized to him, is mounting an equally vigorous First Amendment defense that the document was being discussed at the top levels of our national-security apparatus, and the decision to publish it in full was within the public’s interest.

Steele, for his part, had briefed reporters on the dossier in the months before it became public, encouraging them to attempt to verify its information through independent reporting. But he has reportedly told friends that he never intended for the raw intelligence in the dossier to be published. (He also fought being deposed at all.) When I interviewed Gurvits for my earlier piece on the BuzzFeed-Gubarev showdown, he gave me a broad road map for what he was hoping to get out of Steele: “I’m going to establish that the information about my client was wholly unsolicited, that [Steele] himself doesn’t believe it’s true, and that he hasn’t done anything to vet if it’s truthful.” A BuzzFeed spokesman told me at the time, “We’re definitely in a position where we could fight this thing to the end.”