President Donald Trump attends a joint news conference with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
As the president's lawyers try to limit the damage discovery may do to Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit in Florida, the British Broadcasting Corporation has asked a prominent judge in Washington, D.C., to stop the "continued secrecy" and bring "important" Jan. 6 evidence to light.
In a short reply memo on Wednesday, the BBC told Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg that it is entitled to see more of the judge's rulings that went against Trump's claims of executive privilege during special counsel Jack Smith's grand jury probe. Those decisions have largely been kept under seal.
"[E]ven though President Trump has now chosen to sue the BBC for libel and specifically claimed it would be false to imply that his speech incited violence on January 6, he is again asserting executive privilege in an effort to stop the BBC from obtaining the same evidence from the same witnesses to support the same conclusion as to incitement," the filing said. "Equity favors unsealing the Executive Privilege Decisions so that the BBC can respond to these already-rejected assertions of the privilege, obtain this important evidence, and defend itself effectively."
Last month, Trump argued the BBC made "excessive and impermissibly broad" discovery requests, ostensibly to put the "events" of Jan. 6 on trial in Florida. The BBC defendants claimed Jan. 6-related discovery would show that Trump can't "prove that he did not foment or incite the January 6 Capitol riot."
Although a magistrate judge agreed Tuesday that the "full relitigation of Jan. 6 is not at issue" in Florida, focusing instead on Trump's financial records, the BBC hopes Boasberg will unseal information that could determine the outcome.
"[U]nsealed decisions will likely be crucial to obtaining information that could be dispositive of President Trump's lawsuit, as the BBC expects them to show that President Trump's assertions of executive privilege have already been rejected, and must fail again," the filing said. "The Court should therefore further unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions and prevent the injustice that would arise from President Trump using already-rejected privilege claims to withhold such vital information."
The BBC said Trump "impeded" its efforts to discover "such evidence" through a directive to former Vice President Mike Pence's attorney Greg Jacob.
"Most recently, the White House directed former Counsel to the Vice President Greg Jacob not to produce to the BBC 'potentially responsive documents' because they are 'subject to a potential assertion of executive privilege,'" court documents said, urging Boasberg to "promptly unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions to the greatest extent possible."
Trump has claimed that the Panorama documentary "Trump: A Second Chance" defamed him by editing the words of his Jan. 6 speech out of sequence and giving viewers the "mistaken impression that [he] had made a direct call for violent action" that day.
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