The BBC has demanded that Donald Trump hand over his personal text messages in a £10bn (£7.5bn) defamation lawsuit over his alleged involvement in the January 6 riots in Washington.
The broadcaster’s lawyers are seeking to prove in court that the US president should be held responsible for encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol following his 2020 election defeat.
His lawsuit was launched after it was revealed that a BBC Panorama documentary, aired in January 2021, had spliced together two parts of his speech to appear as though he was directly inciting the mob.
In the broadcasted clip, he can be seen telling the crowd to walk down to the Capitol to “fight like hell”. In reality, Mr Trump had said they would walk to the iconic US building to “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”.
Later in his speech, he said, Mr Trump told the crowd: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
Mr Trump has accused the BBC of damaging his reputation, despite the fact the Panorama episode was not available on the BBC’s US platform.
Lawyers for the BBC have now applied to the US government to receive evidence gathered in a report last year, which concluded that “the violence was foreseeable to Mr Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay”.
This includes messages sent between Mr Trump and his advisers in the three hours before his speech and calling for the rioters to disperse.
In their legal document, the BBC said: “In [his] lawsuit, President Trump claims that the BBC defamed him by editing his speech at the White House Ellipse on January 6, 2021 in a manner that he claims conveyed the allegedly false implication that he fomented the violence that followed at the Capitol.
“Thus, as the BBC explained and the government does not dispute, President Trump cannot prevail in his case if he cannot establish the falsity of that alleged implication.”
It also noted that they had served subpoenas on third parties, with his lawyers so far refusing to supply documents under the conditions of “executive privilege”.
A federal judge in Florida ruled on Wednesday that Mr Trump must provide detailed information about his companies’ finances in response to a motion filed by the BBC.
First reported by Politico, the ruling will likely be appealed by the Trump legal team. But if it holds, the decision will open the door to discovery motions targeting the financial data of roughly 400 companies and business interests controlled by the Trump family’s blind trust, according to the news outlet.
The BBC declined to comment.
