Trump to sue BBC for as much as $5 BILLION over propagandistic J6 speech edit
President Donald Trump has said that he will be suing the BBC for between $1 billion and $5 billion for how the publicly funded news entity selectively edited to make it appear that Trump called for violence at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in a program released recently.
The president was speaking to reporters when he was asked about suing the media corporation. “We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion and five billion dollars sometime next week. I think I 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.”
“That’s worse than what CBS did with Kamala. They changed her answer, but at least it was coming out of her mouth,” Trump added.
On Thursday, the BBC officially apologized, with a statement being posted by the organization, “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.”
Previous to the statement, Trump’s legal team sent a letter to the BBC, demanding it retract any “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” about the president by Friday, or the company would be sued for $1 billion.
The legal threat concerned a spliced edit of Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, where the program’s audio made Trump appear to say, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, the line of Trump telling supporters to go down to the Capitol as well as the line telling them to “fight like hell” are an hour apart. Those lines were only brought together through cutting out that hour, in which Trump also said for those at the Capitol to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
On Thursday, the BBC also issued a correction on the program, which stated that with the program, “During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech.
“However, 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 would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement,” the correction added.