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If the president fails to comply with the new deadline, the court could penalize him — possibly by dismissing the lawsuit altogether.
At a distance, it’s tempting to think Donald Trump would want his defamation case against the BBC to move forward as quickly as possible. The president, however, has apparently been reluctant to sit down for a deposition in his own lawsuit.
Over the summer, attorneys for both sides negotiated a schedule, which included plans for an Oct. 16 deposition. That didn’t happen: The Republican’s lawyers recently canceled the session and said he was unavailable “due to other matters of national importance.”
Left unsaid was that the “matters of national importance” were campaign rallies in red states as the president tried to rescue the careers of Republicans struggling in their campaigns due to his historic unpopularity.
Lawyers for the British broadcaster, dissatisfied with this state of affairs, went back to court to ask the judge to force Trump to set a firm date to submit to questioning in the case. This proved effective, as U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett on Thursday morning ordered the plaintiff to sit for a deposition by Dec. 11.
An Associated Press report noted that Lett went on to say that if Trump failed to comply with the new deadline, the court could penalize him, possibly by dismissing the lawsuit altogether.
While Trump has earned a reputation as a president who loves to file outlandish lawsuits against major news organizations, this gambit against the BBC was weird even for him.
Late last year, Trump sued the British broadcaster for $10 billion over a news program that focused on the Jan. 6 attack. Defending the litigation, Trump told reporters that the network “literally put words in my mouth,” adding, “I guess they used AI. … They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with Jan. 6 that I didn’t say.”
That wasn’t quite right. For one thing, the BBC didn’t use artificial intelligence. For another, the network did air a program that edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, connecting two clips that were delivered roughly 50 minutes apart, but the news outlet didn’t manufacture words or phrases out of whole cloth.
Nevertheless, the editing sparked a controversy that led to an internal investigation, and the BBC ultimately fired some senior officials and issued a written apology.
Trump, however, apparently doesn’t want an apology. He wants $10 billion.
The president has filed a great many dubious lawsuits against independent news organizations, nearly all of which have ended in failure, and given what’s publicly known about his case against the BBC, there’s no reason to assume it will fare any better.
As for why Trump appears reluctant to be deposed, his lawyers haven’t offered any explanation, though it’s worth emphasizing that the president has a rather embarrassing track record when it comes to his performance in depositions in other, unrelated cases — a point one would expect his attorneys to be aware of.
Another point of contention in the BBC case is the network’s interest in speaking to former special counsel Jack Smith, whom Trump’s lawyers want to exclude. That matter has not yet been resolved. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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