President Donald Trump said Monday that he plans to sue the BBC this week for “putting words in my mouth” following a scandal in which the British public broadcaster stitched together two different quotes spoken by Trump at his Jan. 6, 2021 rally.
The incident sparked an outcry from Trump’s supporters and resulted in the resignations of two executives at the network.
“They put words in my mouth, literally,” Trump said Monday from the Oval Office following a medal ceremony honoring service members deployed to the southern border. “They had me saying things I never said. I guess they used AI or something.”
The British broadcasting network in early November announced that a pair of news executives would step down after an internal memo by a former standards adviser was reported in The Daily Telegraph, revealing that the network edited footage of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech in a documentary.
Trending
The BBC edited its video of Trump’s speech to make “the U.S. president ‘say things [he] never actually said’ by splicing together footage from the start of his speech with something he said nearly an hour later,” according to the 19-page internal dossier.
BBC Director-General Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, CEO of news and current affairs, resigned a week after the Telegraph’s reporting, saying that they were ready to take accountability for the network’s “mistakes” while insisting there is no institutional bias in the newsroom.
Trump had previously said he was considering a personal lawsuit against the British network for libel, estimating damages between $1 billion and $5 billion.
“They actually had me speaking with words I never said, and they got caught,” Trump said Monday. “That’s fake news and we’ll be filing that suit this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
Author
