In December, President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC, seeking the enormous sum of $5 billion under claims that the British news outlet selectively edited one of his speeches to give the impression that he was responsible for the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Now, Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein reports that a judge has dealt a massive blow to Trump’s case.
According to Gerstein, the Florida judge overseeing the case has refused a request by Trump’s legal team to have the magistrate judge overseeing the discovery portion of the case reassigned. The president’s lawyers had asked for a replacement for Judge Enjolique Lett, who had previously served as an attorney for Orbis, a company Trump sued in relation to the infamous Steele dossier, a controversial 2017 document that alleged a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The decision made by Judge Roy Altman asserts that the Trump legal team’s basis for the request was “unavailing,” rejecting the two arguments they put forth. They had questioned the mechanism for the assignment of Lett, which Altman rejected, saying the magistrate had been assigned based on workload and nothing else. They also questioned Lett’s ability to remain impartial considering her involvement with the Orbis lawsuit, but as Altman pointed out, the law states that judges can only recuse themselves from a case. “Accordingly,” wrote Altman, “we’ll leave any decision regarding Magistrate Judge Lett’s recusal to her sound judgment.”
Trump’s lawsuit stems from the assertion that the editing of a BBC piece was libelous. He claims that the news outlet intentionally edited a speech he delivered on January 6th, 2021, as the Capitol insurrection began, in a way that made it appear he had urged supporters to acts of violence.
The BBC lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions Trump has taken against news organizations. Some of these suits have been more successful than others, garnering Trump multimillion-dollar settlements from the likes of CBS and ABC. Another nearly half-billion dollar lawsuit against CNN was dismissed, and suits against the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are currently ongoing.
His latest legal blow comes on the heels of another setback in his case against the Wall Street Journal, in which a judge declared that Trump’s legal team could not use the process of discovery to search for evidence of their yet-unsupported claims. The judge, who had previously thrown the suit out for being "conclusory and without factual support,” has called the case “expensive yet groundless.”
