A lawyer from the BuzzFeed team declined to discuss what they plan to ask Steele now. But as for Gurvits, who previously lost a motion to compel the revelation of Steele’s Gubarev source, he said he will seek to establish that Steele believes the allegations against Gubarev are untrue. Gurvits also will try to undermine Steele’s credibility, a seemingly risky move given Steele’s sterling reputation in the intelligence world. “I’m sure I can establish in this deposition that he hasn’t been to Russia in 17 years,” Gurvits told me. “I’m not so sure a guy who hasn’t been to Russia in a little south of 20 years is really connected there.” (Steele worked in Moscow under diplomatic cover in the early 90s, but it has been too dangerous for him to operate within Russia ever since his undercover status with Britain’s MI6 was blown in 1999; he is known to meet with sources outside of Russia, as well as communicating with high-level Russian contacts through intermediaries.) “I’m going to establish that the information about my client was wholly unsolicited,” Gurvits continued, “that [Steele] himself doesn’t believe it’s true, and that he hasn’t done anything to vet if it’s truthful. . . . We’ve been very careful to read the books [and articles] published about him. Where else do I know that one of his friends called BuzzFeed a bunch of tossers? I might ask him about that at the deposition.” (As I’ve previously reported, BuzzFeed also is trying to depose former F.B.I. Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to establish that the dossier was being discussed among top members of the national-security apparatus. That motion is still pending.)

Kevin Goldberg, a Washington-based First Amendment attorney with Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, told me he thinks “there’s a lot riding on that deposition because, if true, the fact that BuzzFeed didn’t contact Gubarev or anyone at XBT is problematic. Steele’s deposition testimony could be relevant not only to the truth or falsity of the allegations but the extent to which BuzzFeed would have been justified in relying on” what Steele wrote in the dossier. “Their level of fault, or lack thereof,” said Goldberg, “could come into play if a false and defamatory statement of fact was made. Testimony provided by Steele could be influential as to whether BuzzFeed acted appropriately, because it may show that BuzzFeed had good reason to rely on factual statements he included in the dossier.”

Dossier aficionados like Harding will be keenly interested in whatever escapes Steele’s lips on June 18, even if they’re keeping their expectations low given the limited scope of the deposition and Steele’s knack for discretion. “It’s highly unlikely that Steele will say anything about his methods or his sources,” Harding told me, “and frankly, why should he?” Of the BuzzFeed-Gubarev showdown overall, Harding said, “It’s an intriguing scene in a Shakespearean play, but it’s not an entire act. When the definitive history of this unhappy epoch is written, this will be a footnote.”

In my interview with Gurvits, he focused on how the prosecution is concerned only with a very small portion of a wide-ranging set of documents. “They’re not being sued for what the rest of the dossier said,” he told me. “They’re being sued because the last memorandum in the very last paragraphs contains several sentences that accuse my client of being an F.S.B. spy who committed crimes against the United States by misusing his computer network. That’s really what it says.” BuzzFeed’s argument is that it made a decision, in the public interest, to publish the dossier as a whole, and therefore has a right to defend the publication of the dossier as a whole. This defense earned some credence last month in a separate but essentially identical defamation case that several Russian businessmen, also named in the dossier, filed against BuzzFeed in New York. That lawsuit is not as far along, but in a May 7 legal filing, the presiding judge acknowledged that the dossier was “part of briefings to President Obama, Vice President Biden and President-Elect Trump on January 6, 2017 and that the Dossier was given to the FBI Director.” Therefore, according to this judge, the article with which BuzzFeed published the dossier was one that “reported on an issue of national public interest.” (On Monday, as this article was going to press, the judge in the Florida case likewise recognized the relevance of these briefings. In a ruling on the application of privileges meant to protect the press when reporting on government activity and matters of public interest, she wrote, “The Court cannot conclude as a matter of law that the Article is other than a fair and true report of an official proceeding. . . . This does not dispose of the case, however, because application of the privilege turns on whether facts essential to its application are undisputed.”)