U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed he will bring a lawsuit against the BBC over an edited speech of his in a Panorama documentary.
“We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and five billion dollars, probably sometime next week,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Friday night, according to White House audio of the press opportunity posted to YouTube.
Trump was responding to a question from a British reporter over the BBC apologizing for the documentary edit in its Trump: A Second Chance? program, but rejecting any basis for compensation.
“I have to do it. I mean, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. I mean, not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth. That’s worse than what CBS did with Kamala,” Trump said.
A BBC spokesperson on Thursday, in a statement, said “BBC chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the President’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the program.”
The U.K. broadcaster’s statement added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
Trump, in his press encounter on Air Force One on Friday, said he would discuss the issue with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer this weekend, and asserted, “the people of the U.K. are very angry about what happened as you can imagine because it shows the BBC is fake news.”
Earlier this week, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and the corporation’s director-general Tim Davie resigned after the BBC was found to have edited a Jan. 6, 2021, address where Trump, speaking before the attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., was made to appear as though he was “calling for violent action,” according to BBC chair Shah.
This week’s series of responses from the BBC were intended in part to respond to Trump’s threat of a lawsuit against the U.K. broadcaster, much as he has done with U.S. news outlets in the U.S., including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
