Faith Wardwell
Trump’s legal team sent the BBC a letter earlier this week demanding it retract any “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” about the president from a 2024 documentary by Friday, or face a $1 billion lawsuit.
In a statement posted by the BBC on Thursday, the network said its chair, Samir Shah, had sent a personal letter to the White House apologizing for the edit and that the network has “no plans” to rebroadcast the program.
“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,” an unnamed spokesperson wrote in the statement.
The White House deferred a request for comment to Trump’s outside counsel. Alejandro Brito, the attorney who sent Trump’s demands, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The legal threats center on a spliced edit of Trump’s speech ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that appeared in the network’s program “Trump: A Second Chance?” In the clip, the president appears to say “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we'll fight. We fight like hell.”
In reality, those lines were delivered almost an hour apart, and the footage also omitted a soundbite where Trump tells supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
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