'Things only get worse for Trump' as he tries to duck deposition: legal analyst

President Donald Trump could be headed for a legal quagmire — including an uncomfortable deposition — unless he pulls the plug on his $10 billion BBC defamation lawsuit.

Last Tuesday, Federal Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett handed Trump a devastating ruling: he must disclose his financial information as part of discovery in the case, which led former US Attorney Joyce Vance to suggest the president is now in a corner.

As she wrote on her Substack platform, Trump's lawyers did all they could "to avoid this moment" by deploying a novel argument.

"The lawyer told Judge Lett that Trump is only going to claim damage to his reputation and not to his businesses. But she {Lett] admonished him she does not have the ability to excise Trump’s initial damages demand from the complaint—Trump does not appear to have filed a motion to do so," Vance wrote.

The consequences are severe: investigators can probe his financial records, business operations, and personal wealth — the very information Trump has fought desperately to conceal for decades

According to the former prosecutor, "Even though the case isn’t set for trial until March of 2027, things only get worse for Trump from here on out. Discovery in civil cases can consume a great deal of time. The Judge’s order permits inquiry into more than 400 Trump entities, and Trump himself will almost certainly have to sit for a deposition."

After asserting that every evasion, every inconsistency becomes ammunition for opposing counsel, Vance claimed she sees no path forward with the lawsuit.

Noting Trump's habit of withdrawing lawsuits when they become treacherous for him -- particularly since depositions from him have ended badly -- Vance wrote, that the "Judge’s decision is so clearly right in the context of the case Trump brought that it’s not wrong to start wondering how long it will take Trump to dismisses the lawsuit—before he’s forced to turn over information he has long sought to keep out of the public view. Expect some sort of mumbo jumbo excuse about the demands of the presidency forcing him to step aside."