Trump court tactic just blew up in his face: analysis

Liz Dye, host of the Law and Chaos podcast, says President Donald Trump has again bitten off more than he can chew. Speaking on Wednesday with “On the Media” co-host Brooke Gladstone, Dye laid out exactly how Trump’s favored tactic of draining money from his enemies’ legal funds is laying him flat in his $10 billion defamation suit against the British Broadcasting Company.

Last year Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC over a 2024 episode of Panorama titled “Trump, a Second Chance.” In his complaint, Trump claims the episode was defamatory because it edited together two sections of his January 6, 2021 speech, highlighting his line calling on his supporters to “fight like hell,” while omitting a section in which he told them to peacefully protest. The BBC apologized but refused to pay up.

On Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett said the BBC can proceed with subpoenas against Trump’s advisers and confidants and family members to make their case on what Trump’s actual goals were on January 6. And he ruled that Trump must hand over hundreds of financial records.

But before Judge Lett unleashed his invasive ruling against Trump, U.S. District Court Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, delivered a painful punch of his own with a decision that Trump may have initially thought was a kindness.

“Altman does what initially looks like a favor for Donald Trump: He says ‘go ahead and take discovery while I think about this motion to dismiss.’ And now Trump is delighted because he can do what he loves to do, which is bleed the media outlet by forcing them to pay their lawyers and go through all of this expensive discovery,” Dye told Brooke. “But that turned out to be a monkey's paw because it does not seem to have occurred to Trump or his lawyer Alejandro Brito that both sides will get to take discovery.”

The BBC's lawyers immediately did what good lawyers do: they sprayed subpoenas on everyone inside and outside the U.S. government and anyone anywhere near Trump on January 6. This included Trump confidant Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, First Lady Melania, aid Rudy Giuliana and even his kids, among others.

“The gangs all here, not to mention Don Jr., because if the question is whether it is defamatory to imply that Trump told his followers to ride to the capital and the issue of whether he intended them to ride at the capital is totally relevant,” said Dye. “… On top of that, they want all of Trump's financial documents because if you ask for $10 billion in damages you’ve got to show your work. You’ve got to say ‘this is how this broadcast financially harmed me.’

Trump, who spent years fighting the January 6 Committee to not divulge the same information, does not want to do this, said Dye. Worse, his lawyer is not capable of even delivering.

“Even if Trump really did want to cooperate with discovery in this case his lawyer Alejandro Brito is not set up for this,” said Dye. “He runs an eight-lawyer shop in Coral Gables. He is set up to send a mean letter to media outlets demanding $10 billion. He is not set up to run a billion-dollar lawsuit. You need a whole fleet of associates. You need massively expensive document management software and of course you wouldn’t have that if you're a smalltime guy. That's just the reality of time management.”

“And so Brito is kind of flailing around and he missed some deadlines,” continued Dye. “The documents he turned over were insufficient. They contain boilerplate nonresponses and he really starts to blow this home-court advantage with judge Altman … when he tried to get the magistrate judge, who is a sort of assistant judge, to dismiss. He claimed that she was biased and judges are quite protective of the magistrate, so he really has managed to make judge Altman pretty p—— off at this.”

But the BBC is not settling anytime soon. Paying Trump $10 billion is a shameful waste of British taxpayers’ money. And Trump, as Dye puts it, “is as popular as drug-resistant syphilis in the UK.”

Trump will likely surrender his suit before he’s called as a witness, she said, and that’s just as well. Because when media outlets pay big money to litigious politicians that's millions of dollars that don't go to support journalism.

“And it puts these outlets in a terrible and possible existential choice over how much risk they’re willing to take to report stories that make powerful people mad,” said Dye. There has to be more than the New York Times and the Washington Post being willing to report these stories because they are big enough to absorb the litigation risk. And it's even worse when the Justice Department, which is after all funded by you and me and every other American taxpayer, gets co-opted to support this billionaire president’s effort to harass media outlets, suppress speech and penalize journalists reporting on him in ways that he doesn't like.”