Billion-dollar BBC lawsuit threatens to expose Trump’s executive privilege claims
President Donald Trump's $10 billion BBC defamation lawsuit threatens to expose his repeated legal losses to attorney and former special counsel Jack Smith during sealed grand jury proceedings.
The BBC filed a reply brief Wednesday, asking Chief Judge James Boasberg to unseal rulings from the Smith investigation in which courts uniformly rejected Trump's attempts to shield witnesses from testifying under presidential executive privilege.
According to the Smith report, between August 2022 and March 2023, courts rejected Trump's privilege claims in five sealed proceedings, covering 14 witnesses.
Trump is now asserting identical privilege claims to block the BBC from reaching the same witnesses and evidence regarding January 6 incitement allegations, per the reply brief.
The BBC told Boasberg it would be fundamentally unjust to allow Trump to hide behind "already-rejected privilege claims."
Additionally, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett of the Southern District of Florida ruled Trump must surrender financial records tied to more than 400 companies, Politico reports.
The trial is scheduled for February 2027.
Watch the video below.
Reporter flags Trump’s ‘Hunger Games-style’ kids competition as next odd D.C. spectacle
A political correspondent flagged Trump's "Hunger Games-style" competition as auditions began for kids who will compete.
During an episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, Farrah Tomazin wrapped a conversation about Trump's D.C. beautification projects and spectacles, like the Great American State Fair, by pointing to the next big events he has planned in the nation's capital.
Even though July 4 has passed, "more America 250 spectacles are going on very soon," like an Indy car race and an event Trump is calling the "Patriot Games." It involves bringing together kids from around the country to compete against each other.
"Keep your eye out for this," Tomazin said about the Patriot Games. "It's essentially a Hunger Games-style event."
She was evoking the famous Hunger Games franchise from books and movies, where kids from a dystopian world fight to the death.
"This will not include death and destruction or the like," Tomazin said about the Patriot Games. "But it's basically getting kids from different schools to compete in the nation's capital for a made-for-TV ESPN spectacle."
According to Tomazin, "auditions" to recruit kids to compete in the Patriot Games are "going on at the moment," and the Trump-backed Freedom 250, which organized the Great American State Fair, has "called for auditions where you have to provide an audition tape."
She also compared it to America's Got Talent, the reality competition show, as kids "have to provide them with an audition tape to talk about yourself and how much you love the country, and then you'll get to go to the nation's capital and compete in some sort of Patriot Games."
