Jack Smith, former special counsel at the Justice Department, testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., US, September 29, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump is fighting to keep former special counsel Jack Smith from testifying in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, setting up a new legal showdown over the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
The BBC subpoenaed Smith for a deposition as part of its defense, according to court documents filed Monday.
Legal journalist Adam Klasfeld broke the news on X, reporting that Smith “didn’t object to the subpoena.”
“Team Trump opposes,” Klasfeld added.
In the eight-page filing, Trump’s attorneys argued that Smith has no firsthand knowledge of Trump’s state of mind during his Jan. 6, 2021, speech and that his testimony would be irrelevant. They also argued the BBC has already conceded the edit was false, pointing to BBC Chair Samir Shah’s public apology, which said the documentary “gave the mistaken impression that you had made a direct call for violent action.”
But the BBC fiercely pushed back.
“Plaintiff cannot seriously dispute the injustice of blocking Mr. Smith’s testimony,” the network’s attorneys wrote Monday.
The BBC argued that Smith, who spent years investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is uniquely positioned to address questions surrounding the president’s speech. In his public testimony, Smith declined to name witnesses or discuss the sources of his evidence, citing grand jury secrecy rules, but the BBC argued he could answer those questions in a deposition under an exception for judicial proceedings.
“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith,” the filing states.
The network also rejected Trump’s attempt to prevent it from gathering evidence needed to defend itself.
“No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol,” the attorneys wrote.
The BBC noted that Chief Judge James Boasberg, who is weighing a related BBC request to unseal records in Washington, called the network’s “overarching point” “a pretty good one,” saying it gets sued and then gets “stymied” when it seeks discovery, “a pretty unfair result.”
A judge will now decide whether Smith can be questioned under oath.
Klasfeld also pointed out Monday that Trump canceled his deposition scheduled for Oct. 16 because of “matters of national importance.”
“The BBC alerts the judge that those matters were: a rally in Dalton, Ga. and a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago,” he wrote.
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