Main: President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart Joint Base Andrews, Md., Friday, May 23, 2025 (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta). Right inset: U.S. District Judge Roy Altman (U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida).
Weeks after Donald Trump's private lawyers bristled that the president's defamation lawsuit against the BBC threatened to put him on "trial" for Jan. 6 through discovery, the DOJ swooped in with a "blanket challenge" of subpoenas. Now the BBC is attempting to turn the tables, telling a judge the DOJ's decision to file the statement of interest in the first place "raises grave ethical concerns, just like the ones" exposed in Trump's IRS case.
The Friday filing from the BBC in U.S. District Judge Roy Altman's court said the DOJ's filing was "improper" in multiple ways.
The defendants argued that the DOJ's "blanket" resistance of subpoenas for documents and communications of "private individuals and organizations" — while repeating Trump's "flawed arguments" — is the same kind of water-carrying that another judge in the district slammed at length one week ago.
There, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar, also directing the court clerk to mail a copy of her order to the State Bar of New York — where Trump's former criminal defense attorney, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, faces an ethics investigation; Brito also filed the BBC lawsuit.
Williams found that Trump and the DOJ engaged in a "non-adversarial, collusive" lawsuit to improperly force the IRS into a $1.776 billion "settlement" that "had no viable basis in law or fact."
"President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' to prominent positions in the DOJ," the judge noted.
The BBC told Judge Altman that the DOJ's statement of interest on Trump's behalf in his defamation lawsuit should be given "no weight," as it similarly "raises grave ethical concerns, on par with those that Judge Williams addressed earlier this week in Trump v. IRS."
"The government cannot brush those concerns away merely by asserting that Plaintiff filed this lawsuit 'in his personal capacity,' because to do so is to insist that this Court 'accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump's current job title from an understanding of what happened here,'" the filing said, quoting Williams' ruling. "Indeed, Plaintiff identifies himself in the caption of the Complaint and throughout as 'President Trump.' In the face of this conflict of interest, where Plaintiff is arguing against Defendant's discovery both through his own personal lawyers and through government counsel, the only course that preserves fundamental fairness and due process would be to give the government's Statement no weight whatsoever in adjudicating this discovery dispute – a dispute in which, after all, the government need not have involved itself in the first place."
A footnote called it ironic that the DOJ complained about a subpoena of Donald Trump Jr. "even though the government itself — specifically, the U.S. Secret Service — has to date prevented Defendant from serving that subpoena on Mr. Trump Jr."
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