Left: President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally for Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Right: Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel under President Donald Trump, arrives at an interview room in the O'Neill House Office Building to answer questions from investigators with the Jan. 6 Select Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 8, 2022 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File).
President Donald Trump's attorneys threatened to "seek sanctions" against the British Broadcasting Corporation for refusing to back down from an effort to force former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to testify about his potentially "significant insight" into Jan. 6, court documents showed Monday.
To bolster its defense against Trump's defamation lawsuit in Florida, the BBC has asked Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., to unseal to the "greatest extent possible" various executive privilege rulings that went against Trump during special counsel Jack Smith's grand jury probe.
Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit in Florida over "Trump: A Second Chance," a Panorama documentary, even after the BBC admitted it "gave the mistaken impression that [he] had made a direct call for violent action" on Jan. 6 by editing together "excerpts from different points" of Trump's speech from the Ellipse out of sequence.
The BBC has attempted to turn the tables by seeking discovery that it anticipates will show Trump can't "prove that he did not foment or incite the January 6 Capitol riot."
As part of that effort, the BBC subpoenaed Cipollone and urged Boasberg to see that the dispute is precisely why he should shed light on Trump's "already-rejected privilege claims."
In a three-page notice on Monday, the BBC's attorneys shared an exhibit of an email exchange with Trump's legal team, starting Friday afternoon.
At that time, the president's attorney Alejandro "Alex" Brito said he was making a "good faith effort to resolve a discovery issue" — the BBC's subpoena of Cipollone to sit for a deposition.
According to Brito, Cipollone's testimony is not only "privileged" but also "plainly irrelevant."
"[W]e will be left with no alternative but to bring this matter to the Court's attention, and will seek sanctions, including an award of attorneys fees," warned Brito, if the BBC did not withdraw the subpoena. He wrote that the BBC "previously canceled the deposition of Cassidy Hutchinson after her lawyers advised that they intended to file a motion to quash the subpoena you served on her," and that the media company should do the same in light of Cipollone attorney Michael Purpura's statement that his client "will not be providing testimony that would violate any privileges."
But it was the BBC that brought the sanctions threat to Boasberg's attention on Monday, asserting it is "entitled to discover [Trump's] intention behind the [White House Ellipse] speech" and that Cipollone has "personal knowledge on these exact issues."
"[W]e understand that Plaintiff previously asserted executive privilege to prevent Mr. Cipollone and others from testifying in connection with Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation, and '[t]he courts uniformly rejected Mr. Trump's privilege assertions,'" the BBC said, citing Smith's report on Jan. 6. "Due process prevents the sitting President from filing a defamation lawsuit against a news organization and then asserting executive privilege to block that defendant from obtaining relevant evidence to contest his claims."
"Releasing the Executive Privilege Decisions in unredacted (or less redacted) form will thus avoid the possible injustice of an already-rejected assertion of privilege preventing Mr. Cipollone from providing sworn testimony that would be highly relevant to President Trump's defamation claim," the notice ended.