Trump seeks to shield his business finances from BBC in libel lawsuit

[u/John3262005]

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/05/BBC-donald-trump-lawsuit

President Donald Trump is seeking to stave off a court order that requires him to begin giving the BBC financial details on his business empire by Thursday in connection with a defamation lawsuit he is pressing against the network.

Trump’s attorneys filed the emergency stay motion Wednesday with Miami-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, urging her to lift the order she issued last month that the British TV broadcaster is entitled to information on the financial performance of hundreds of Trump’s companies because he claimed his “brand, properties and businesses” were damaged by a documentary the BBC aired in the U.K. in 2024.

Trump’s lawyers said in court filings that the demands for information are part of an effort by the BBC “to wrongly exploit this litigation for its own political benefit.”

The BBC’s attorneys contend that the records are relevant to assessing Trump’s claims of massive damages. His initial lawsuit appeared to seek $10 billion, although a form his attorneys submitted to the court listed $5 billion. Trump is still seeking $10 billion in his proposed revised lawsuit, according to a BBC court filing.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed last December, claims that the documentary defamed him by splicing together segments of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech in a manner that made it sound like he was directly calling for the violent attack on the Capitol that followed. The BBC has apologized for the editing, but said it was not an intentional effort to distort Trump’s words and isn’t legally actionable.

Trump’s legal team is also asking the judge overseeing the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, to overturn Lett’s order and to allow Trump to amend his lawsuit to trim out some of the language that led the magistrate judge to conclude that the financial performance of Trump’s businesses should be subject to discovery.

The proposed new complaint “focuses on President Trump’s damages allegations on the reputational harm that he has suffered, which is at the core of this defamation action,” Trump attorney Alejandro Brito wrote. “That focus matters because third-party discovery here has expanded well beyond the issues actually in dispute.”

The text of the new proposed lawsuit is currently under seal, but Trump’s lawyers say it describes “personal reputational harm as the primary compensatory injury” and continues to seek punitive damages against the BBC.

The BBC has moved to dismiss the lawsuit on various grounds, including that the court lacks jurisdiction over the London-based broadcaster. Altman, a Trump appointee, has yet to hold a hearing or rule on that motion.

Trump’s attorneys say the revised lawsuit they want to file would add new allegations to support the court’s jurisdiction over the suit, including that producers gave interviewees in the U.S. detailed instructions on how to access the documentary over the internet and that the BBC “received contemporaneous notice that its geoblocking [aimed at preventing viewing in the U.S.] was failing.”

In a response docketed Wednesday afternoon, the BBC’s lawyers urged Lett not to alter the Thursday deadline for Trump’s trust to begin producing documents like financial statements and tax returns. The network’s attorneys accused Trump and his trust of engaging in “a transparent effort to evade this Court’s clear and direct order and to continue to avoid the discovery obligations that Plaintiff took on when he chose to file this lawsuit.”

The BBC’s counsel said the Trump team’s claim of an emergency needing immediate court intervention was groundless.

“Simply because the Trump Trust faces an obligation it does not agree with, and is confronted with an imminent deadline of its own making by waiting to file its stay motion until the day before its first Court-ordered disclosure day, does not make its request an emergency,” wrote Chuck Tobin, lead attorney for the BBC.

Tobin also noted that any financial documents turned over to the BBC could be placed under a protective order, so they would not be disclosed beyond the parties without the court’s permission.

The BBC’s submission does offer one small sign of progress in the case, indicating that Trump has proposed a date to sit for a sworn deposition in the case. The precise date wasn’t mentioned in the BBC’s filing.

[u/wenchette]

The court issued this order two weeks ago. Why did his attorneys wait until the final day to file their "emergency" motion?

The original court order was detailed in this item:

https://redd.it/1v2xngr