BBC Wants Jack Smith’s Testimony In Trump’s Defamation Lawsuit

Oct 27, 2026 03:10 PM EDT, Tue

Why the BBC wants to depose Jack Smith, and why Team Trump wants to stop them

“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith,” the network’s lawyers explained in a court filing.

By Steve Benen

Oct. 20, 2026, 11:27 AM EDT

In hindsight, it seems like Donald Trump might not have fully thought through the consequences of his bizarre $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, which continues to move forward in ways the presidential plaintiff doesn’t seem to like.

Attorneys for the British broadcaster, for example, recently subpoenaed former special counsel Jack Smith to testify.

“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him,” the BBC said in a court filing.

The president and his lawyers apparently don’t see it that way. The New Republic reported:

President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.

The BBC has subpoenaed Smith to defend itself from Trump’s accusations that the network defamed him with deceptive editing in a 2024 documentary about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. In a court filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers tried to fight the subpoena by claiming that “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.”

In response, the BBC’s attorneys wrote, “No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim, including Plaintiff’s burden to prove falsity.”

To recap briefly, Trump sued the British broadcaster for $10 billion late last year 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 delivered roughly 50 minutes apart; but the news outlet didn’t manufacture words or phrases out of whole cloth.

The editing nevertheless 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 didn’t want to settle for an apology. He wants $10 billion.

The case, however, has proven rather inconvenient for the Republican who filed it. BBC lawyers want to depose the president as part of the proceedings, but Trump has already backed out of a scheduled deposition and appears reluctant to answer questions about his own case.

As The New Republic report added, “His attorneys are also fighting attempts to … children to testify and to dive into his finances.”

Now those same lawyers want to prevent the former special counsel, who has plenty to say about Trump’s Jan. 6 efforts, from answering related questions, further delaying the case that the president ostensibly wants to proceed.

The judge has scheduled a hearing for later this week to consider questions about the Smith deposition and discovery related to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago revenue, which would help shed light on whether the president has suffered damages as the result of the alleged defamation. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

  1. Katie Zacharia lasted less than half a Scaramucci2 as White House Press Press Secretary. 2026-10-12 – 2026-10-16 ↩

  2. Anthony Scaramucci / LinkedIn White House Press Communications Director. 2007-07-21 – 2007-07-31 ↩

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