President Donald Trump's legal team moved Friday to shut down the BBC's bid for court-assisted subpoenas targeting three members of the first family, arguing the British broadcaster is weaponizing the discovery process in a $10 billion defamation lawsuit that Trump himself initiated.
Trump's personal lawyers filed a court brief urging U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz in Miami to reject the BBC's request for help serving subpoenas on daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Trump Jr. The lawyers characterized the effort as a 'politically-driven leverage' campaign, not a legitimate search for evidence.
Judge Kuntz did not immediately rule on the dispute.
The subpoena saga has a procedural backstory. In May, a process server working for the BBC attempted to serve subpoenas on Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their residence, where Secret Service agents said they were not authorized to accept the documents, according to Trump's lawyers. A follow-up visit to Trump Tower in New York to serve Donald Trump Jr. also failed. The BBC subsequently asked the court for permission to deliver the subpoenas by certified mail rather than in person.
Kuntz, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, inherited the president's lawsuit from another judge less than a week ago. Court filings did not specify a reason for the reassignment. The previous judge had already set a February trial date.
The underlying lawsuit, filed in December, centers on a BBC documentary aired roughly one week before the 2024 presidential election. Trump's complaint alleges the broadcaster deceptively edited portions of his January 6, 2021 speech near the White House — splicing together separate sections to misrepresent what he said — in what the suit calls 'a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence' the election outcome. The BBC has apologized for the misleading edit but denies that it defamed the president.
Trump's lawyers argued in Friday's filing that the BBC's subpoena motion 'cannot be segregated from the politically charged discovery campaign that it is based on, and which has already been ruled as improperly overbroad by this Court.'
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The numbers come first, and here the number is $10 billion — the damages Trump is seeking from a state-backed foreign broadcaster. Whatever one thinks of the underlying merits, the discovery phase of a plaintiff's own lawsuit cuts both ways: when a sitting president files suit, the defendant gains a legal right to probe the plaintiff's world. Trump's team is now learning that lesson in real time, fighting to keep family members out of the BBC's deposition queue.
The court has not ruled. Until it does, the only established fact is that the BBC wants the records and Trump does not want to hand them over. Free-enterprise readers who value procedural fairness should note that the same discovery rules apply to every litigant — including the one who chose to file.
