Former special counsel Jack Smith attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., September 29, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump and his legal team are scrambling to stop the BBC from calling a major surprise witness in his ongoing defamation case, and as legal expert Lisa Rubin told MS NOW, it is seemingly because of the damningly "on-point" evidence they have to share.
Late last year, Trump sued the BBC, alleging defamation after the network aired a documentary in its Panorama series prior to the 2024 election, which touched on the January 6 Capitol riots. Trump's suit claimed that the footage of his speech to supporters prior to the attacks was selectively edited to make it appear as if he had directly asked his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building, a claim the network has vigorously fought back against.
Currently, Trump and his team are fighting in court to prevent the BBC from calling former special counsel Jack Smith into court for testimony. Discussing the ongoing case during a Tuesday appearance on MS NOW, Rubin explained that Smith, as he has strongly implied in the past, might have key evidence that could blow up the president's argument against the BBC — and expose his connection to the Capitol riots in the process.
Rubin laid out the situation when pressed by host Alicia Menendez.
"This lawsuit is sort of an unusual defamation case because what it's about is how the BBC edited together portions of the speech that Donald Trump gave at the Ellipse on January 6th," Rubin said. "And in particular, he's saying that the way that the BBC edited it gave the false impression that he directly called for violence. The BBC is saying, 'No, actually, even if the speech was edited together in a way that gave that impression, if the speech as a whole not only gave that impression, but was his intent, it was never false to begin with.'"
This, she noted, is where the evidence from Smith's extensive investigation of January 6 comes into play.
"And the greatest expert on all of that is Jack Smith," Rubin continued. "Because even though we know what his report says, he's never disclosed the evidence on which it's based. But he has said publicly that he has strong evidence that Trump knew the violence was foreseeable, that he caused it nonetheless, and then he leveraged it to try and prevent the vote that day. And so if the core question is whether the speech was false, then Jack Smith's evidence, according to the BBC, is very on point and relevant to whether or not there was a false statement."
Trump's team is attempting to argue that a legal rule precludes Smith from sharing information in court "because it was developed in the context of a grand jury." However, Rubin noted, there is another rule that allows grand jury evidence "to be discussed in other judicial proceedings."
