BBC chairman says 'determined to fight' Trump's threatened defamation lawsuit: report

BBC Chairman Samir Shah reportedly told staff on Monday that "we are determined to fight" President Trump's threatened defamation lawsuit over a documentary released just before the 2024 election.

Trump on Friday signaled that his legal team intends to move forward with a defamation lawsuit against the BBC, despite its recent apology for editing clips from his Jan. 6, 2021, speech in a way that appeared to indicate he was calling for violence.

“There is a lot being written, said and speculated upon about the possibility of legal action, including potential costs or settlements. In all this we are, of course, acutely aware of the privilege of our funding and the need to protect our licence fee payers, the British public,” Shah wrote in a staff note, which was obtained by The Hill news outlet.

“I want to be very clear with you – our position has not changed,” he added. “There is no basis for a defamation case and we are determined to fight this.”

The British news corporation on Thursday apologized for the editing, acknowledging that it failed to live up to the company's standards by giving a false impression, and promised to never show the segment again. 

"We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action," the BBC said.

"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 company added.

The segment edited Trump's declaration at the White House that he and his supporters were "going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women," and his statement nearly an hour later that Republicans "fight like hell." 

The clip instead combined the comments to have the president state: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."

Criticism of the program also prompted BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness to resign.

Trump's attorneys first threatened to sue the network for $1 billion on Sunday over its broadcast of a Panorama episode that aired last year if it did not issue a retraction, apologize, and compensate him for the misleading edits.

The BBC apologized to the president but did not agree to compensate him.

“We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I think I have to do it. I mean, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”