US President Donald Trump has said in an interview on Friday that he will sue the BBC for “anywhere between $1billion to $5billion’ for editing his speech in an “egregious” manner in 2021 on the day his supporters stormed the Capitol building.
The BBC sent Trump an apology earlier in the week but said that there was no legal basis for a case. The letter seemingly prompted Trump to lash out.
Talking to GB News’ Bev Turner, “I’m not looking to get into lawsuits, but I think I have an obligation to do it. This was so egregious.”
He added that if one doesn’t do such things, one doesn’t stop them from happening to other people.
The American President also talked to journalists outside the White House, stating, “We’ll sue them from anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week. I think I have to do it.”
Trump had given BBC until Friday night to issue a full retraction, an apology and offer of compensation for what he said amounted to misleading the viewers watching the channel’s flagship show Panorama on Jan 6.
BBC has called their editing of the speech an “error of judgement” but refused to pay any financial liability.
A spokesperson for BBC said, “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
In the same interview, Trump called London’s Sadiq Khan a “terrible, terrible mayor”. He then went on a diatribe against the Muslim mayor, referring to him as a “disaster” and a “nasty person”. He also repeated his false claims that there are areas in London where the police can’t go because Sharia is being implemented there.
The BBC had admitted that “our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told reporters the corporation is a “Leftist propaganda machine”.