Donald Trump has said he will sue the BBC next week after the corporation apologised but declined to compensate him for its edited version of a 2021 speech broadcast by Panorama.
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One, the US president said he would sue the corporation for “anywhere between 1 billion dollars (£759.8 million) and 5 billion dollars (£3.79 billion), probably sometime next week”.
He had previously said he had an “obligation” to launch a billion-dollar lawsuit against the broadcaster, saying in an interview with Fox News that the BBC had “defrauded the public”.
Speaking on Friday evening, he said: “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.”
In a separate interview with GB News broadcast on Saturday, Mr Trump said: “I’m not looking to get into lawsuits, but I think I have an obligation to do it.
“This was so egregious. If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people.”
On Thursday, the BBC said the edit of Mr Trump’s speech on January 6 2021 had given the “mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.
The broadcaster apologised and said the splicing of the speech was an “error of judgment” but refused to pay financial compensation after the president’s lawyers threatened to sue for one billion dollars in damages unless a retraction and apology were published.
Chairman Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing, and lawyers for the corporation wrote to the president’s legal team, a BBC spokesperson said.
The spokesperson 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.”
Mr Trump told GB News he has had “a lot of success” litigating against news organisations.
“Because it’s fake news,” he said. “But I’ve never had anything so fake as the BBC.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve never seen anything like (the BBC edit). That’s, that’s the most egregious.
President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrew on his way to Mar-a-Lago (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
“I think that was worse than the Kamala (Harris) thing with CBS and 60 Minutes.”
In July, US media giant Paramount agreed to pay Mr Trump 16 million dollars (£13.5 million) to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 CBS interview with Ms Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Mr Trump said his administration would be “finding out a lot of things over the next few months” through litigation.
He said the lawsuit would “probably” be filed “someplace in the US”, but said that litigation in the UK “moves a little bit quickly”.
He added that he would be speaking to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over the weekend.
The Panorama scandal prompted the resignations of two of the BBC’s most senior executives: director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.
The programme, broadcast a week before the 2024 US election results, spliced two clips together so that Mr Trump appeared to tell 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.”
BBC Director-General Tim Davie has resigned (Lucy North/PA)
The broadcaster said it will not air the Panorama episode Trump: A Second Chance? again, and published a retraction on the show’s webpage on Thursday.
It said: “This programme was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump’s 6th January 2021 speech was edited.
“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 judgment.”
A spokesperson added: “The BBC has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary Trump: A Second Chance? on any BBC platforms.”
According to BBC News, the broadcaster set out five main arguments in its letter to Mr Trump’s legal team as to why it did not believe there was a basis for a defamation claim.
It said the BBC did not distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels and was restricted on iPlayer to viewers in the UK; that the documentary did not cause Mr Trump harm as he was later re-elected; that the edit was not done with malice and was designed to shorten a long speech; that it was not meant to be considered in isolation but as part of an hour-long programme; and that an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation laws in the US.
On Thursday, reports said that the BBC faced separate accusations of misleading viewers about Mr Trump’s 2021 Capitol speech more than two years before the Panorama edit aired.
In an episode broadcast in June 2022, Newsnight reportedly played an edited version of his speech, similar to the one used in the Panorama programme.
A BBC spokesperson said about the fresh claims, reported by The Telegraph’s Daily T podcast: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”
