Donald Trump has told reporters he will still take legal action against the BBC next week, despite the British broadcaster apologising for a misleading edit of one of his speeches.
On Friday evening, the US president told reporters aboard Air Force One “we’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5bn, probably sometime next week. We have to do it.”
The BBC sent a personal apology to Trump on Thursday, but said there was no legal basis for him to sue the public broadcaster over a documentary his lawyers called defamatory.
The corporation rejected his demands for compensation, after lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn (£760m) in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him.
The BBC has also agreed not to show the edition of Panorama again.
Trump said he had not spoken with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer – with whom he has built a solid relationship – about the issue, but that he planned to call him this weekend.
In an interview with GB News on Friday, Trump said the edit was “impossible to believe”.
“I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement,” he said. “Fake news was a great term, except it’s not strong enough. This is beyond fake, this is corrupt.”
The BBC chair, Samir Shah, sent a personal apology on Thursday to the White House and told lawmakers the edit was “an error of judgment”. The following day the culture minister, Lisa Nandy, said the apology was “right and necessary”.
The corporation is already reeling from the resignations of its director general, Tim Davie, and the BBC News chief, Deborah Turness, which followed the splicing together of the Trump speech in an edition of Panorama last year.
The programme was broadcast a week before the US election. The spliced clip suggested that Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.” The words were taken from sections of his speech almost an hour apart.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
