A federal judge on Monday threatened to sanction President Donald Trump's personal attorneys after they missed a court deadline in his sprawling $10 billion libel lawsuit against the BBC — and tried to cover their tracks with a pair of last-minute procedural filings.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, ordered Trump's legal team to explain by June 10 why he shouldn't penalize them for what he called their "apparent disregard of court deadlines." Trump's lawyers had been due to respond to the BBC's motion to dismiss the case by June 5. Instead of filing that response, they submitted two eleventh-hour motions — one seeking leave to file excess pages, another seeking to file under seal — neither of which asked the court to extend the deadline. Altman also asked whether the BBC's motion to dismiss should be considered unopposed.
The lawsuit, filed in December in the Southern District of Florida, accuses the BBC of defaming Trump by splicing together two portions of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech — made nearly 55 minutes apart — to make it appear he had urged supporters to march on the Capitol and "fight like hell." The BBC has apologized for the edit but is fighting the suit, arguing the Florida court lacks jurisdiction over a documentary that never aired in the United States.
Legal experts have been skeptical of the case from the start. Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told CNN the suit "does not have any legal basis, either on defamation or jurisdictional grounds," calling it "the president's latest effort to intimidate media companies." University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones told CNN the $10 billion demand is "a ridiculously hard number to sustain without a strong showing that there was an actual viewing audience."
The BBC's motion to dismiss has been pending since March.
