BBC continues to run rings around Trump in defence of defamation lawsuit

The BBC aren't letting Trump off the hook.

Ever since Trump filed his ludicrous $10bn claim against the BBC over the edit of a Panorama documentary, the broadcaster has refused to cow down to the US president’s bullying.

The BBC’s position is clear: if Trump wants to bring this case against them, they’re going to quite rightly take every measure in their power to defend themselves.

And it seems Trump doesn’t like this one bit.

BBC determined to get Trump to testify – as judge threatens sanctions if he doesn’t

Last week, it was revealed that the BBC had requested that Trump testify under oath as part of the discovery part of the case.

Trump swerved the deposition, which was scheduled for 16 October, with his lawyers citing “matters of national importance” as to why he couldn’t attend.

However, the BBC’s legal team has since noted that these “matters of national importance” were actually a campaign rally in Georgia and a trip to Mar-a-Lago for a Republican fundraising event.

On Friday, Magistrate Judge Enjolique Aytch Lett warned Trump there would be sanctions if he doesn’t comply with the discovery order for him to sit for a deposition.

A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for Thursday.

BBC subpoena for potentially key witness opposed by Trump’s legal team

At the same time, the BBC’s lawyers want to subpoena Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought an election conspiracy indictment against Trump, Deadline reports.

Smith oversaw a Justice Department investigation into Trump’s role in the January 6 US Capitol riots and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. Trump was indicted on four charges following the investigation, but the case was wound down after Trump was re-elected as president.

In a filing in federal court on Monday, the BBC said Smith did not object to the subpoena, writing: “The conclusions of Mr. Smith’s report are public — but the evidence that informed those conclusions is not, including the ‘strong evidence that the violence that occurred on January 6 was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, and that he and his coconspirators leveraged it to carry out their conspiracies.’”

But Trump’s legal team are scrambling to try and block the deposition, arguing that Smith “lacks any personal knowledge of the issues in this matter.”

“Any evidence that Smith gathered during his investigation consists of secondhand knowledge based on materials that he and other third parties collected from various sources,” the president’s lawyers wrote.

Why is Trump suing the BBC?

In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the BBC broadcast Trump: A Second Chance?, an episode of its Panorama series.

The contentious piece of editing which is under scrutiny came in the documentary when Trump addressed a crowd at the US Capitol on January 6 2021, before the riots broke out.

The words which Panorama broadcast were: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

However, the full, unedited footage shows that Trump actually said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

And then, more than 50 minutes later in the speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”

Trump accused the broadcaster of defamation and of violating Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, according to court documents filed in Florida.

He claimed the documentary was “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory and malicious,” and its airing a week before the 2024 election was a “brazen attempt to influence the election’s outcome.”

The US president is claiming $5bn (£3.75bn) for defamation and another $5bn for the violation of trade practices, totalling $10bn (£7.5bn).

The BBC has already formally asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out on the grounds that the documentary was not made available to watch in the US, and therefore could not have defamed him or had any material impact on the 2024 election.

The trial is in the discovery phase, where both parties must turn over documents and information. The BBC has tried to extract as much information from Trump as possible to examine what damage, if any, was done to him as a result of the documentary.

Funnily enough, Trump hasn’t been particularly keen to comply with these requests.

The BBC has also asked for permission to subpoena Trump’s children as they may have relevant knowledge of the events surrounding his January 6 speech. These attempts to serve subpoenas have encountered obstacles.

A provisional start date for the two-week trial has been set for February 15 next year.