US President Donald Trump has asked a federal court to deny the BBC’s request to subpoena his next of kin as part of a $10 billion lawsuit over a documentary it aired.
On Friday, Trump’s lawyers argued that the BBC had launched a “campaign of political revelations” by forcing testimony from Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., daughter Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
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Trump’s team appealed to the court to dismiss the BBC’s complaint, likening it to a fishing expedition that was beyond the scope of a lawsuit.
“This case concerns a narrow error in the BBC’s deliberate splicing of two parts of President Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech nearly 55 minutes apart,” Friday’s court filing said.
“Rather than litigate its narrow claims, the BBC sought to pursue a thorough investigation under the guise of discovery.”
The lawsuit began in December when President Trump announced he would sue the BBC over an episode of the documentary series “Panorama,” which chronicled the Republican leader’s path to a second presidential term.
Part of the documentary focuses on the events of January 6, 2021, when the 2020 election results were scheduled to be certified. Trump lost that election, but falsely claimed his loss was the result of fraud.
In a speech outside the White House that day, he repeated his baseless accusations that the election was “rigged” as a rally of supporters, some of whom took part in the storming of the U.S. Capitol hours later, took place.
The Panorama episode included snippets of President Trump’s speech, and critics claimed that two sentences of Trump’s speech were edited to make it sound like one continuous quote.
The first line was, “After this, I’m going to walk down. I’ll be with you. I’m going to walk down.” The second came later in the speech: “And we will fight. We will fight like hell.”
Although the BBC apologized for the edits and removed the Panorama episode from its program, President Trump sued the broadcaster for defamation and filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.
The BBC denied the charges and vowed to fight the charges in court. The case is currently being heard in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida.
As part of its defense, the BBC sought testimony from people close to Trump to establish his thoughts and actions on the day of the January 6 attack.
The newspaper noted that both Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump were present at their father’s speech and spoke with the president and his aides as violence erupted at the Capitol.
Donald Trump Jr. urged his father’s chief of staff to “denounce this shit. ASAP,” according to text messages released by the US Congress, which are cited in the BBC motion.
Although Mr. Kushner was not present at the White House, the BBC argued that his role as Mr. Trump’s adviser would also help establish the facts that day.
After meeting with Congressional leaders, Kushner drafted a “draft statement condemning the use of violence” to present to President Trump, the broadcaster’s lawyers said.
The BBC claims that testimony from Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Kushner could help explain the president’s “burden to prove that his insinuations that he incited violence on January 6 were materially false.”
However, the motion added that the BBC has been unable to issue subpoenas to the three family members due to the presence of US Secret Service protection.
The BBC reportedly tried to deliver subpoenas to Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their official residences in May, but Secret Service agents reportedly claimed they were not authorized to receive the documents.
Similarly, that same month, the BBC failed to subpoena Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in New York. So they asked the court for permission to use certified mail to deliver the documents instead.
But in a court filing on Friday, Trump’s lawyers accused the BBC of waging a “cynical” campaign that involved “harassment of the president’s family, colleagues, staff, officials and others.”
He also said the BBC’s work was an “open-ended re-examination of the events that took place on 6 January 2021”.
The filing suggests that any interactions involving Ivanka Trump and Kushner are “subject to executive privilege” by the president, as the two served as advisers and senior advisers to President Trump, respectively.
Throughout his two terms in office, Trump has fully asserted executive privilege.
Just this month, the U.S. Department of Justice released a memo declaring that such privileges also cut off communications with private advisers who work outside the executive branch, effectively making their interactions with companies and individuals immune to subpoenas.
Critics fear the memo could pose a hurdle to government transparency under the Trump administration and could even prevent Congress from accessing investigative materials.
California Sen. Adam Schiff framed the memo as insurance against congressional oversight in case Republicans lose their majority in Congress in November’s midterm elections.
“This latest opinion should be viewed as a partisan move to protect the president and his corrupt practices from Congressional subpoenas should the majority flip,” he said in a statement on Aug. 11.
A federal court in southern Florida has not yet ruled on the BBC’s subpoena request.
Meanwhile, the BBC is trying to have the entire case thrown out, saying Trump is trying to undermine free speech.
