Attorneys for the BBC want to subpoena Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought an election conspiracy indictment against Donald Trump, as the network defends itself against the president’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit.
In a filing in federal court on Monday, the BBC legal team noted that Smith is not objecting to the subpoena.
They wrote, “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.’”
Trump sued the BBC in December over the documentary Trump: A Second Chance? that aired in the run up to the 2024 presidential election. At one point in the documentary, a clip is shown from Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech, in which he says, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” In fact, the remark was an edit of different portions of the speech.
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Trump claimed in his lawsuit that 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.”
Trump’s legal team opposed the Smith deposition, contending that he “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.
On Friday, Magistrate Judge Enjolique Aytch Lett warned of sanctions if Trump doesn’t ultimately comply with a discovery order, which includes sitting for a deposition. The BBC’s legal team has noted that his deposition was scheduled for last Friday but they were informed that he was no longer available then due to “matters of national importance.” They wrote that the president’s counsel has claimed that Trump is unavailable on any date before the close of discovery.
On Monday, the BBC lawyers noted that on Friday, Trump “attended and addressed a campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia, alongside Plaintiff’s favored candidates in Georgia’s upcoming U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections.” Trump “subsequently traveled to his resort club and residence at Mar-a-Lago for a Republican National Committee fundraising event,” they noted.
The judge has scheduled a hearing for Thursday.
The BBC has been seeking to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the documentary was not shown in the United States.
