Donald Trump has accused the BBC of trying to harass his family after the broadcaster sought to subpoena members of his family to challenge his $10 billion defamation lawsuit.
The president is suing the BBC for defamation over a Panorama episode that spliced together two parts of a speech he gave ahead of the Capitol riots in 2021.
Lawyers have requested a U.S. court order Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner to give documents and testimony in relation to the case.
But a spokesperson for the president’s legal team said in a statement to The Times: “The BBC intentionally defamed President Donald J Trump, and now the BBC is seeking to harass him, his family and supporters by abusing the deposition process.”
“The BBC is simply trying to distract away from their own obvious liability,” they added.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment. The BBC declined to comment.
The BBC has previously argued that subpoenaing the relatives would shed light on the president’s thought process around the speech to determine whether the remarks were meaningfully altered by the documentary.
It believes they are material witnesses to the president’s actions on January 6 and therefore their testimony is directly relevant to the claim as the president has framed it. They say that his family were in the Oval Office when the speech was being prepared.
Attempts to serve Trump’s relatives with subpoenas have so far been unsuccessful due to the fact that the trio have been protected by the United States Secret Service as members of the sitting president’s immediate family.
The BBC has claimed it has “endeavoured to resolve the issue” without seeking the Court’s assistance.
It has asked the court for the orders to be served by email and certified mail. Trump’s legal team have until Friday to respond to the request ahead of the trial commencing in February in Miami.
The corporation has previously issued an apology for an “error of judgment” and for editing the programme to give “the impression of a direct call for violent action”.
The retraction said: “This programme was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump’s 6th January 2021 speech was edited.
“During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech.
“However, we accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.
“The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement.”
