Donald Trump Confirms He Will Sue The BBC For Up To $5 BILLION After They ‘Changed His Words’

Earlier this week, Donald Trump set a deadline for the BBC to apologise and compensate him for a misleading edit in the Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?”, which aired last year.

The BBC did apologise, but refused to compensate Trump as they claimed he suffered ‘no loss’ from the edit. Naturally, this was insufficient for Trump who now seems to have upped his threat to sue the BBC for $1 billion to potentially $5 billion.

The President said: ‘We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion (£792m) and five billion dollars (£3.79bn), probably sometime next week.

‘We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.’

The spliced clip implied that Trump told the crowd: ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.’

In reality, the words broadcast were spoken by Trump almost an hour apart.

BBC chairman Samir Shah had sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing of the speech i but added: ‘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.’

The scandal has also led to the resignations of BBC director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness, and the Panorama episode itself being taken down from the BBC website and replaced with a retraction.

So can Trump actually sue the BBC? Apparently so, but only through a US court where the statute of limitations don’t apply (the period has since passed in the UK). Even then it gets tricky because the documentary was never aired in the US, and the BBC’s public broadcasting arm has no US entity.

In any case, according to political scientist Robert Spritzer, it’s not even about the money for Trump, but rather, to harass and terrorise his enemies.

Spritzer says: ‘He utilised it in thousands of cases while he was a businessman and before he entered politics. And the point is not necessarily to win lawsuits. In Trump’s case, it is less about winning than it is generating publicity that he views as favourable to himself, to harass whoever it is that he is suing, to ratchet up the anxiety for the individuals or organisations that he is suing.’

Still, Trump is so ruthless that he may even end up sanctioning the UK until the BBC pays up. $5 billion is much cheaper than a total trade shutdown, after all. I wouldn’t put it past him.

For the time Trump ‘humiliated’ Keir Starmer at the Gaza peace summit, click HERE.