Trump to Sue BBC for $5B

President Trump has confirmed he will sue the BBC for up to $5 billion after its Panorama programme doctored one of his speeches.

Speaking to The Telegraph onboard Air Force One, Trump said he would formally seek damages against the BBC as early as next week for between “$1b and $5b”.

“I think I have to,” he said.

The President added that Sir Keir Starmer was “very embarrassed” by the scandal, and that he would speak to the Prime Minister over the weekend.

The Telegraph revealed earlier this month that the BBC had doctored a speech delivered by Trump to make it seem that he had encouraged the storming of the Capitol on January 6 2021.

The corporation on Thursday apologised to the President after he threatened to sue it for $1b in damages if it did not say sorry for the edit, but rejected his claim of defamation.

But speaking onboard Air Force One on Friday night, Trump said he still intended to pursue legal action against the corporation and could seek up to $5b in damages.

‘They changed the words coming out of my mouth’

“We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn and $5bn probably some time next week,” he told The Telegraph, en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“I think I have to do it. They’ve even admitted that they cheated… They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”

“The people of the UK are very angry about what happened as you can imagine because it shows the BBC is fake news,” Mr Trump continued, saying Sir Keir was “very embarrassed” by the scandal.

Praising The Telegraph’s reporting as a “great service… exposing fake news”, he said the broadcaster had acted “worse than what CBS did with Kamala”.

The president was referring to a broadcast of CBS’s 60 Minutes last year, shortly before the election, when an interview with his political opponent Kamala Harris was edited to make her answer sound more coherent.

Trump declared that CBS, the sister channel of the BBC, had attempted “election interference” and sued it for $10bn. He settled the case earlier this year for $16m.

In a separate interview on GB News on Friday night, Trump claimed he had an “obligation” to take on the BBC, which he labelled “corrupt” and “beyond fake”.

“This was so egregious,” he said. “If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people. I think you probably have an obligation. I’d like to find out why they did it.”

The president hit out at the BBC’s “stupid” claim that it had “unintentionally” misled viewers about the content of his speech on Jan 6.

“They wrote me a nice letter saying [they] apologise. But when you say it’s unintentional, I guess if it’s unintentional, you don’t apologise,” he said.

“But they took my words, you know, and I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement.”

The BBC has been thrown into turmoil by The Telegraph’s revelation that it had spliced together two statements made by the president almost an hour apart to make it seem as if he was inciting rioting at the Capitol.

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, resigned on Sunday evening amid a backlash in what was seen as the corporation’s worst crisis since the Jimmy Savile scandal more than a decade ago.

Trump had said in his speech: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”

Roughly an hour later, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”

In Panorama’s version, he said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

The BBC agreed not to show the edition of Panorama again.