So let me get this straight. The BBC, a foreign broadcaster that couldn’t even be bothered to show the full speech Donald Trump gave on January 6, chopped it up to make him look like something he wasn’t, aired the result a week before the 2024 election, and then had the nerve to say “sorry about that” while insisting they didn’t do anything wrong. And now they want a federal judge to help them rummage through his daughter’s paperwork?
Bless their hearts.
Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion back in December, and if you’ve seen what they did, you understand why. They took separate pieces of his speech near the White House and spliced them together to change the meaning. That’s not journalism. That’s editing with scissors and an agenda. Even the BBC had to apologize for the “misleading edit,” though they still deny defaming him. Which is a little like backing over somebody’s mailbox and then saying you didn’t damage their property.
Now the BBC wants subpoenas served on Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. They want testimony. They want documents. They want to drag the president’s family into a courtroom over a lawsuit that he filed against them. Trump’s lawyers called it what it is: “politically-driven leverage.” And they’re right. The BBC got caught with its hand in the cookie jar and now wants to make the family’s life miserable to force a settlement.
Here’s where it gets even sillier. Back in May, the BBC sent a process server to Ivanka and Jared’s house. The Secret Service turned him away because, surprise, you can’t just walk up to a protected residence and hand somebody a folder. Then the same process server went to Trump Tower to serve Don Jr. and struck out there too. So now the BBC is asking the judge if they can just mail the subpoenas certified instead. Certified mail. For a $10 billion defamation case. That’s like sending a wedding invitation by carrier pigeon and hoping for the best.
Daniel X. O'Neil from USA (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThe case is now sitting in front of U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz down in Miami, who inherited it from another judge less than a week ago. Nobody’s saying why it got reassigned. The previous judge had set a February trial date, so this thing is moving whether the BBC likes it or not.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. A British news organization edited an American president’s words to change their meaning, ran it right before an election, and when the president had the temerity to sue them for it, their response was to go fishing through his children’s records. Not to defend the edit. Not to explain why they spliced the speech. To dig through his family’s files.
If you can’t see the difference between reporting the news and manufacturing it, I can’t help you. And if you think a foreign broadcaster ought to have more rights in an American courtroom than the president of the United States, then I have questions for whoever’s been running things around here.
The BBC apologized. That tells you everything. You don’t apologize for an edit you believe was fair. You apologize because you know you got caught. Now they want to make this about the Trump family instead of about what they did. The judge should shut this down, let the trial go forward in February, and make the BBC answer for its own scissors work.
That’s just common sense. But common sense has been in short supply lately.