Former British MI-6 Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele, who was paid $168,000 by Fusion GPS' Glenn Simpson to write and promote the dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee was a no-show in a civil court case.

The multi-million dollar libel case has brought against Buzzfeed after the media outlet published the unverified disinformation dossier at Steele's insistence. Steele was paid to promote the fake dossier among select journalists in a smear campaign against President Donald Trump.

According to reports from Fox News, Steele was a no-show Monday for a long-requested deposition in London. The news comes as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have announced a criminal referral on Steele.

Evan Fray-Witzer, a Boston-based attorney representing Russian tech tycoon Aleksej Gubarev in multi-million dollar civil litigation, described Monday's U.K. court actions to Fox News. "My understanding is that Mr. Steele's lawyers spent a good deal of time arguing why they thought he (Steele) should not be required to sit for a deposition and that ultimately the court took the entire matter under advisement." Gubarev is suing the British-based Steele's company Orbis Business Intelligence because the dossier also smeared Gubarev's companies which include XBT Holdings and Webzilla.