Donald Trump has confirmed he will the BBC over a spliced Panorama edit for ‘anywhere between $1 billion to $5 billion’.
The broadcaster apologised to the US president after a clip of one of his speeches which appeared on Panorama which was edited to appear as if he was explicitly urging people to attack the Capitol on January 6 2021.
He said: ‘We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion (£792m) and five billion dollars (£3.79bn), probably sometime next week.
‘We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.’
The spliced clip implied that Trump told the crowd: ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.’
The words broadcast were spoken by Trump almost an hour apart.
The broadcaster told Trump it was an ‘error of judgement’ and the programme will ‘not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms’.
A BBC spokesperson said chairman Samir Shah has sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing of the speech in the Panorama programme, but added: ‘While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.’
Trump threatened legal action after a report from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee.
