A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump will have to sit for a deposition in a $10 billion defamation case he brought against the BBC.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yeah. A federal magistrate judge ruled Thursday that it was Trump's choice to sue the British broadcaster, and he has to play by the rules of the court or face sanctions.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik attended the hearing in Miami. David, why was there even a question about whether the president would sit for a deposition?
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Well, I mean, he is the president. And it's this president - right? - A. You know, this was a - in some ways, a hearing about logistics in front of a magistrate judge. It sounds like it's a pretty pro forma kind of thing. But actually, you know, really fundamentally at its core is a question of whether the sitting president of the United States will submit to the will of a federal court. He had agreed to sit for a deposition, which is to say questions under oath, for last Friday, October 16, but it was canceled. President's legal team said it was due to matters of national importance and said he could do it sometime in January. There's a deadline in mid-December for the completion of what's called discovery. It's where the two sides get evidence for one another for this case.
Trump's private attorney invoked the idea yesterday the president does a lot more things than you could possibly know. The BBC's lead attorney said, hey. That's fake news. He noted that last Friday, Trump campaigned with a Republican Senate candidate in Dalton, Georgia, then went to Mar-a-Lago for an event for the Republican National Committee. The magistrate judge said, no. Let's do this. You're going to have to do this by December 11. There's a possibility that could shift if the judge presiding over the case changes the deadline.
And the judge also said, look. You got to hand over evidence. All the material that the president's legal team gave to the BBC was stuff that the BBC had either handed over to the president's team or that - stuff that the president's legal team, according to the BBC's lawyers, had pulled down from the internet. Not any private records at all. The judge said that strained credulity.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So tell us about the case.
FOLKENFLIK: So back in October of 2024, just a few weeks before the presidential elections, the BBC show "Panorama" broadcast a documentary in which it spliced together parts of the January 6 speech, 2021, that made it seem as though Trump, at that, you know, pivotal day, when there was a siege of Congress - made it seem like he was bluntly calling for violence to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of that race. Trump says this was false, deceptive and defamatory under Florida law - is seeking $10 billion.
He's tweaked a little bit the grounds on which he's doing it, putting aside the claim that he made initially that this damaged his business and future financial prospects. Now he's talking mostly about his reputational injury. But as the BBC argues, his reputation is bound up in business and politics. I want to point out to listeners, "Panorama" was not aired in Florida or on U.S. channels or on the BBC's, you know, streaming partners here in the U.S. And the other thing the BBC points out is Trump not only won the 2024 race. He won Florida, handily, too.
MARTÍNEZ: What's the BBC hope to learn from Trump's testimony?
FOLKENFLIK: The BBC did apologize for the splicing. It did - in fact, there was a fallout for some of its officials. But it's now trying to determine what his mindset was. Maybe they can show that he did want to encourage violence. They noted that a lot of defendants said Trump's speech had urged them on.
MARTÍNEZ: Last thing, David. I mean, President Trump has sued lots of news organizations. What's the significance of this one?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, you saw at the outset of his term that media outlets were settling - CBS and ABC. And he's sued, again as a private citizen, all kinds of news outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, others. The BBC has been fighting back, going after details of January 6, but also going after potential vulnerability to the president. He doesn't really want his financial details public. And they are securing information about both the level of interest in people joining Mar-a-Lago, his resort, as members and what costs he has charged them over the years, in recent years since - has been able to charge them.
Trump right now in this lawsuit has to decide how willing he is to play by the rules. Is he willing to submit to the rule of law in federal court in a lawsuit that he voluntarily brought? And if not, it looks very likely that this case will be dismissed.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thanks.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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