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.
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Pete Hegseth has a sperm-count problem: medical experts
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s controversial plan to test service members’ testosterone levels may end up having an ironic side effect on male soldiers, two medical experts said in a new report.
Dr. Adrian Dobs, a professor of medicine and oncology at John Hopkins University School of Medicine explained the issue to The Intercept Friday.
“We’re sort of creating a dependency on testosterone,” Dobs said. “Men who take testosterone will have a reduction in their sperm counts.”
Last week, Hegseth announced a new policy that would see all U.S. service members over the age of 30 be tested annually for testosterone levels, boasting about his efforts to transform the Defense Department into the “High-T Department of War.”
The policy is already facing legal challenges, with a federal judge on Wednesday ordering the Trump administration to explain how the new testing policy squares with its existing ban on hormone treatment for transgender service members.
Per the policy, testosterone screening will be mandatory for all service members over 30, though service members under 30 may voluntarily get screened as well.
The concern among medical experts, such as Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is that mandatory screening may produce unreliable results given that a person’s testosterone levels can vary widely depending on a number of factors, including the time of day and recent meals.
“That creates a risk under a program that will routinely screen otherwise healthy troops and make testosterone therapy available to those subsequently diagnosed with a deficiency,” The Intercept’s report reads.
Furthermore, the policy would almost certainly result in some service members being given testosterone replacement therapy when not medically necessary.
“Here we have men who are in their prime of reproduction, and we’re causing a drop in their sperm counts when there really may not be sufficient benefit,” Dobs said.
