In his lawsuit against the BBC, Donald Trump seeks to do more than bully a major foreign broadcaster. He wants the global press to help him rewrite history by implicitly claiming it’s defamatory to suggest that he inspired the Jan. 6th insurrection.
The documentary by BBC’s “Panorama” — Trump: A Second Chance? — never aired in the United States, but Trump sued the British broadcaster in Florida anyway over an edit of his speech at the Capitol Ellipse that clipped two of his most inflammatory remarks together. The BBC’s subsequent apology over the cut didn’t avert litigation.
Earlier this week, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, who was recently confirmed in a party-line vote after refusing to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. But it gets worse than that: As a Florida state appellate judge, Kuntz presided over another outlandish Trump defamation case against the Pulitzer Prize Board — and sought a federal nomination while presiding over the case. Kuntz ultimately wrote the opinion advancing the case, and he got the sought-after nomination. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, aghast by what they described as a conflict of interest, filed a complaint against him.
During a Substack Live conversation, Michael Popok and I discussed what this means for Trump v. BBC and for the nation’s reputation for press freedom protections in the land of the First Amendment.
Dive deeper into the topic by watching my breakdown on Legal AF here.
In the video at the top of this newsletter, Popok and I also discussed rapid developments in ABC’s new lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission’s attack dog Brendan Carr and more.
