The BBC has seemingly called Donald Trump’s bluff in his defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster, as the president has backed out of a deposition.
As part of the US president’s ludicrous $10bn claim against the BBC over the edit of a Panorama documentary, the BBC had requested that he be deposed.
Initially, Trump’s legal team agreed to this, with the deposition scheduled to take place on Friday, 16 October.
But it seems Trump didn’t fancy answering questions under oath.
A filing released in Tuesday has shown that on 28 September, Trump’s lawyers told the BBC’s counsel that the president “is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance”.
Having said they would follow up with a new date for the deposition, one never came from Trump’s lawyers. Instead, they have suggested the president will be available in mid-January, after the deadline to complete the discovery portion of the case.
So, the BBC is now asking a federal judge to force Trump to sit for a deposition, the Guardian reports.
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The BBC’s motion reads: “Plaintiff chose to file this lawsuit and, in doing so, he accepted the obligations of civil litigation.
“The BBC therefore asks the Court to compel Plaintiff to confirm a date for his deposition, notify the BBC of a secure location where such deposition is possible and any other logistics required to ensure Plaintiff’s safety, and sit for the deposition, as the core rules of discovery require.”
Lawyers for the broadcaster wrote in the motion: “Nearly eight months into discovery, after seven depositions of BBC witnesses, and with only two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself.”
They have accused Trump of ‘flouting’ the legal process, and cited a case in which a judge ruled that: “It is not the court’s role, nor that of opposing counsel, to drag a party kicking and screaming through the discovery process.”
The court documents state: “Here, the court has been required to intervene at every juncture to cajole even the most basic participation in the discovery process out of [Mr Trump].”
As political commentator Don McGowan put it, the BBC have effectively called Trump’s bluff, and now he’s panicking.
Last December, Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC totalling up to $10bn (£7.5bn) over the editing of one of his speeches from 6 January 2021.
The speech, which was broadcast in an episode of BBC’s Panorama series, saw parts of Trump’s speech at the US Capitol spliced together.
Trump accused the broadcaster of defamation and of violating Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, according to court documents filed in Florida.
The US president is claiming $5bn (£3.75bn) for defamation and another $5bn for the violation of trade practices, totalling $10bn (£7.5bn).
The contentious piece of editing which is under scrutiny came in the documentary when Trump addressed a crowd at the US Capitol, 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.”
However, these two sentences had been spliced together during editing, with the BBC acknowledging that the fusion had given “the mistaken impression” Trump had “made a direct call for violent action”.
The controversy caused the resignations of both BBC director general Tim Davie and head of BBC News Deborah Turness.