President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC could give former special counsel Jack Smith a new platform.
The BBC wants Smith — whom Trump has called “a disgrace to humanity” who should be “thrown in prison” over his investigation into the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — to testify in the sprawling lawsuit that already stands to focus harsh light on the president and his inner circle.
The BBC has aggressively used the fact-finding phase of the case to force the president to prove his core claim that he did not incite or foresee the violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him,” the BBC’s lawyers wrote in their motion Monday to subpoena Smith to appear.
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Smith has not objected to the subpoena, according to court records, and could be scheduled to appear for a deposition on Dec. 16.
Trump sued in December, seeking $10 billion in damages from the BBC, whose journalists spliced together two different parts of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, a move that Trump’s lawyers say gave a “misleading impression” of his statements, according to court records.
The BBC has turned the lawsuit against Trump, using it as an opportunity to seek records as part of the discovery process.
Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett threatened to sanction Trump for backing out of a deposition and repeatedly disregarding court-ordered obligations. The judge has also allowed subpoenas of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Trump’s private financial records are also being probed.
In the first volume of his final investigative report released on Jan. 14, 2025, Smith concluded that Trump was the “most responsible” and the central figure in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and subsequent Capitol attack.
But much of the evidence uncovered by Smith’s investigation remains under court seal.
“The conclusions of Mr. Smith’s report are public,” the BBC’s lead counsel, Charles Tobin, wrote in the motion. “But the evidence that informed those conclusions is not, including the ‘strong evidence that the violence that occurred on January 6 was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, and that he and his coconspirators leveraged it to carry out their conspiracies.’”
While U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a trove of evidence related to the Jan. 6 election-interference case, specific grand jury secrets and unredacted law-enforcement details have yet to be seen by the public.
Smith has testified several times before Congress, facing scrutiny over what Republicans view as abuses by Smith and the Justice Department under President Joe Biden.
In those appearances, he has declined to discuss the sources of his evidence “out of concern for violating criminal procedures,” according to the BBC’s motion.
“In this case, however, Mr. Smith could answer such questions,” Tobin wrote, citing a grand jury rule he asserts “allows for an exception ‘preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.’”
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