President Donald Trump’s lawyers made a big mistake in the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, one so big that two legal experts argued on Sunday that it could be evidence of malpractice.
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Trump initially sued the BBC in Florida in December 2025, claiming the network defamed him by mischaracterizing the speech Trump made ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. During the speech, Trump told his supporters they needed to “fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” according to a transcript published by NPR.
In March, lawyers for the BBC filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the court does not have jurisdiction to hear it because the footage was not broadcast in Florida — or anywhere in America — and that Trump suffered no reputational damages from the network’s story because he went on to win the 2024 election.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman gave Trump’s lawyers a June 5 deadline to respond to the BBC’s claims, which they missed, Reuters reported.
Attorneys Brian Kabateck and Shant Karnikian argued on a new episode of their podcast, “Civil Action,” that the missed deadline is a “big problem” for Trump’s case.
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“So, Trump files this lawsuit, probably thinks that the BBC’s going to bend the knee and kiss the ring and all that kind of stuff and settle with him and pay some money to some phony charity. But instead they do discovery, and the problem with that is, be careful what you ask for,” Kabateck said.
Kabateck characterized the response Trump’s lawyers offered as essentially telling the judge, “The president is a very busy man, so he can’t respond to this.”
Karnikian argued that the response was absurd on its face.
“When you don’t respond to that, that’s a very big problem,” he said. “If we did that on behalf of one of our clients … that’s like malpractice to miss a deadline like that. It’s like inexcusable.”
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