Trump walked straight into a fatal legal trap that exposes his whole empire

President Donald Trump set out to get $10 billion from the BBC, but it appears to have backfired. According to legal analyst Jay Kuo — an attorney with a background arguing before the Supreme and 9th Courts — a judge’s latest order in his lawsuit against the BBC could be of “no small consequence,” exposing the very financial records “Trump spent his presidency shielding from public view.”

On Monday, a judge presiding over Trump’s $10 billion suit ordered that Trump begin surrendering the financial records for his business empire as part of the discovery process. As Kuo explains, “The order is a direct consequence of a choice Trump made when he filed the suit. He claimed the BBC’s editing of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, had damaged not just his reputation but the value of his brand, properties and businesses. That’s a self-own of no small consequence because it opened the door to the disclosure of financial records that his lawyers are now scrambling to avoid.”

The judge’s order came after the BBC subpoenaed the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which owns nearly all of Trump’s businesses and properties, seeking financial records related to roughly 400 entities, essentially arguing that the president’s own lawsuit made them relevant for the discovery process. Trump’s attorneys, realizing this would open up his financial records to a media giant armed with veteran lawyers and journalists, attempted to quash the subpoena, arguing that the case had “evolved” to cover reputational harm alone and no longer included Trump’s businesses.

But the judge didn’t buy it, ruling that Trump’s businesses were fair game: “Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case.” And on this basis, she ordered that he had 10 days to begin turning over records relating to trust instruments, schedules of assets, inventories, lists of properties, and documents reflecting the trust’s holdings and value. Now his time is up.

According to Kuo, the judge wrote “that the trust’s relationship to Trump’s alleged damages made its records ‘relevant and material to any damages analysis.’ The mechanics here are ordinary civil procedure, and it was Trump who put all this into play. Plaintiffs who claim specific financial injury open their finances to discovery to test that claim. In his lawsuit, Trump didn’t stop at reputational harm. His complaint alleged the BBC documentary caused ‘massive economic damage to his brand value’ and injury to ‘the value of his brand, properties, and businesses.’ Having pleaded billions in business damages, Trump could not then argue the BBC had no right to examine the businesses themselves. After all, if that damage had occurred as alleged, it would show up in his financial records. Right?”

As Kuo concludes, “We all know that it wouldn’t, and that Trump would never willingly give the press a clear look into those finances. Trump walked into a trap of his own making.”