Donald Trump continued to threaten to sue the BBC for billions Friday night after the broadcaster apologized for its edit of the president’s January 6 speech.
“We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5 billion probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
Trump says he has no choice but to take legal action against he broadcaster, saying, “They've even admitted that they cheated.”
The BBC apologized, admitting that editing the speech in a documentary by its show Panorama was an “error of judgment.” But the broadcaster refused to pay financial compensation.
Earlier in the week, Trump told Fox News that the BBC had “defrauded the public” over the edit, which made it appear as if he was explicitly urging people to attack the Capitol building.
Trump told GB News last Saturday that the BBC’s actions were “so egregious” that he had to take legal action.
“If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people,” he said.
BBC Chairman Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House to apologize for the editing debacle, and lawyers for the corporation have written to the president’s legal team, a BBC spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
Trump told GB News he has had “a lot of success” litigating against news organizations.
“I think that was worse than the Kamala thing with CBS and 60 Minutes.”
In July, media giant Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 CBS interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who was Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2024 election.
Trump said the BBC lawsuit would “probably” be filed “someplace in the U.S.,” but added that litigation in the U.K. “moves a little bit quickly.”
Syrcause Law Professor Gregory Germain believes a defamation lawsuit against the BBC would likely fail.
“Donald Trump’s $1 billion dollar lawsuit against the BBC for editing his public statements in a way he does not like would not, and should not, withstand a motion to dismiss under existing law, and he frankly has a much better chance of winning $1 billion with a lottery ticket than he does of recovering $1 billion from his faulty suit against the BBC,” Germain said.
The BBC scandal prompted the resignations of two of the BBC’s most senior executives, director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.
The Panorama documentary, broadcast shortly before the 2024 election, edited two clips together so that Trump appeared to tell 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.”
On board Air Force One, Trump said, “The U.K. are very angry about what happened, as you can imagine, because it shows the BBC is fake news.”
The president said he would call Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who he claimed was “very embarrassed” by the incident, over the weekend.
The broadcaster said it will not air the Panorama episode Trump: A Second Chance? again, and published a retraction on the show’s webpage Thursday.
It 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 Independent has reached out to the BBC for comment.
On Thursday, reports said that the BBC faced separate accusations of misleading viewers about Trump’s 2021 speech more than two years before the Panorama edit aired.
In an episode broadcast in June 2022, Newsnight reportedly played an edited version of his speech, similar to the one used in the Panorama documentary.
A BBC spokesperson said about the fresh claims, reported by The Telegraph’s Daily T podcast, “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”
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