President Donald Trump, center, walks from Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J., Friday, July 31, 2026, from Camp David, the presidential retreat (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
President Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation has placed the trust bearing his name in "a true emergency" situation entitling it to a stay, or else the trust must "begin surrendering its most sensitive financial records in one day" as part of discovery, court documents said Wednesday.
According to a non-party entity, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett's order last week wrongly found that the subpoenaed "information the Trust possesses is relevant and material to any damages analysis" the BBC "may elect to conduct" in its defense against the $10 billion lawsuit.
Notably, Trump earlier demanded without success that Lett recuse herself from the matter, since she once represented "Steele dossier" author Christopher Steele's company in the president's failed RICO action against Hillary Clinton and others. That case likewise alleged a plot to harm Trump's business interests.
Here, the president has alleged that the BBC's Panorama documentary "Trump: A Second Chance" caused him "extensive economic harms" by editing together "excerpts from different points" of his Jan. 6 speech from the Ellipse out of sequence.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, one of many Trump appointees in the Southern District of Florida, is now being asked to halt Lett's discovery-related order just ahead of her Aug. 6 deadline for disclosure of the "first substantial production" in discovery.
The Trump Trust, also represented by Alejandro Brito, slammed the BBC's subpoena demands as "improperly broad" attempts to discover "confidential tax, ownership, and financial records for approximately 400 entities."
"Once the Trust were to begin handing those records over to the BBC, that disclosure could not be undone, and the Trust's pending objections could not restore what the BBC will already have seen" — including its "most sensitive financial records" — "before the Court can decide whether those records are discoverable at all," Trump's attorneys said.
The Trust urged Altman not to allow irreversible disclosure.
"If the Trust produces now, the harm is immediate and irreversible: the BBC, after demanding a shockingly broad amount of information based on clearly political motivations, will have seen the confidential tax, ownership, and financial records of the Trust and roughly 400 entities, and no order sustaining the Objections can un-disclose them or undo the expense of compiling them," the emergency motion said.
On the other hand, the lawyers asserted, the BBC "loses nothing" if the court grants a stay.
"[F]act discovery runs for several more months, the BBC already holds the Trust's public financial disclosures, and it has parallel financial discovery pending against President Trump," the filing added.