(CNN) BuzzFeed News summarized its defense against a federal lawsuit in a new court filing Monday, laying out in detail how it decided to publish the Russia dossier, a collection of unverified opposition research memos written by British former spy Christopher Steele.

The new court filings, because of their extensive redactions, still don't resolve what happened in November and early December 2016 as the dossier made its way from the office of then-Sen. John McCain to top executive branch officials.

BuzzFeed made the filing in a federal lawsuit in Florida, where the Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev sued the news organization in 2017. Gubarev says BuzzFeed defamed him and his companies when it published pages of the dossier that wrongly accuse him of taking part in Russia's hack of the Democratic National Committee. Following publication, BuzzFeed redacted mentions of Gubarev's company in the copy of the dossier on its website.

Gubarev's defamation case is "tantamount to asserting that the American public should, to this day, be ignorant about the text of a document that has been at the epicenter of government activity and public debate for almost two years," the BuzzFeed lawyers wrote Monday. "It was not grossly irresponsible to publish the dossier."

BuzzFeed's lawyers made extensive redactions in their filing to what they know about what happened between November 2016, when Steele gave the dossier to a Justice Department official and McCain provided it to the FBI and other government agencies, and December 6, 2016, when then-President Barack Obama ordered an investigation into Russian interference in the election. The lawyers involved have deposed Steele and a close associate of the late McCain's, David Kramer, but many details from those depositions appear to still be under seal in court. The lack of clarity around Steele's work has facilitated conservative attacks on the dossier, including from President Donald Trump, to fester in Washington.

Read More