Donald Trump has requested that the deadline for him to sit for deposition as part of his $10bn lawsuit against the BBC should be pushed back.
This week, a judge ruled that Trump’s $10bn defamation case against the BBC should go ahead. The broadcaster had sought to have the case dismissed, arguing that the programme does not meet the legal criteria for defamation and was not available to view in the US.
But, just as it looked like progress would be made on the case, the president has tried to delay proceedings again.
Trump’s deadline to testify under oath
Trump had originally agreed to be questioned by the BBC on 16 October 2026. However, his lawyers subsequently said he was unavailable because of “matters of national importance.”
It turned out that these matters of “national importance” were a campaign rally in Georgia and a trip to Mar-a-Lago for a Republican fundraising event.
Trump’s lawyers proposed moving the deposition into January 2027, with Trump committing to a window of 11–22 January 2027.
The BBC pursued an order compelling him to give evidence, and last month a magistrate judge ordered Trump to sit for deposition by 11 December 2026.
Crucially, the order warned that failure to comply could result in sanctions, including the potential dismissal of his lawsuit.
Trump tries to push back deposition deadline
Now, Trump’s lawyers want the deadline suspended while the court considers a forthcoming request to extend the discovery period and other pre-trial deadlines.
In a motion submitted this week, they argue that the court should not force the President to arrange a deposition in December when it may subsequently agree to a January date.
His lawyers claim the court should give appropriate consideration to the demands of the presidency when scheduling legal proceedings.
Trump’s lawyers argue that arranging a December deposition would require the Secret Service to organise security and logistical arrangements for a date that might ultimately be unnecessary.
They maintain that Trump is not refusing to testify, but simply wants to do so within the January window he has already offered.
Again, it’s important to remember that Trump is the one who has brought forward this legal action. Yet he is dragging his heels and looking to delay proceedings at every opportunity.
Why is Trump suing over a Panorama programme?
In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the BBC broadcast Trump: A Second Chance?, an episode of its Panorama series.
The contentious piece of editing which is under scrutiny came in the documentary when Trump addressed a crowd at the US Capitol on January 6 2021, before the riots broke out.
The words which Panorama broadcast were: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, the full, unedited footage shows that Trump actually said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
And then, more than 50 minutes later in the speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
He claimed the documentary was “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory and malicious,” and its airing a week before the 2024 election was a “brazen attempt to influence the election’s outcome.”
The trial is in the discovery phase, where both parties must turn over documents and information. The BBC has tried to extract as much information from Trump as possible to examine what damage, if any, was done to him as a result of the documentary.
Funnily enough, Trump hasn’t been particularly keen to comply with these requests.