President Donald Trump has urged a federal judge to reject the BBC’s request for the court’s help in securing testimony and documents from three family members in response to his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.
The BBC is trying to gain “politically-driven leverage” over Trump by serving subpoenas on daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Trump Jr., personal lawyers for the Republican president argued in a court filing Friday.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz in Miami did not immediately rule on the dispute.
Kuntz, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, inherited the president’s lawsuit from another judge less than a week ago. Court filings did not immediately specify a reason for the case’s reassignment. The previous judge has set a February trial date.
In May, a process server working for the BBC tried to serve subpoenas on Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their residence but encountered Secret Service agents who said they were not authorized to accept it, according to the president’s lawyers. They said the process server also visited Trump Tower in New York several days later in a failed attempt to serve Donald Trump Jr.
In a court filing last week, the broadcaster asked for the court’s permission to serve subpoenas on Trump’s family members by certified mail instead of in person.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in December, accuses the BBC of deceptively editing portions of the speech that he delivered near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. The suit claims the BBC spliced together separate parts of Trump’s speech to intentionally misrepresent what he said.
The lawsuit alleges the BBC aired its documentary a week before the 2024 presidential election in “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the outcome to Trump’s detriment.
“The relief that the BBC’s Motion seeks cannot be segregated from the politically charged discovery campaign that it is based on, and which has already been ruled as improperly overbroad by this Court,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
The BBC has apologized to Trump for the misleading edit, but it denies defaming him.
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