Judge orders Trump lawyers to explain why they shouldn't be sanctioned for blowing off key deadline [View all]

Source: Law & Crime

Jun 8th, 2026, 4:21 pm


A Florida attorney handling multiple defamation lawsuits on behalf of President Donald Trump has been ordered to explain why he shouldn't be sanctioned for "apparent disregard of court deadlines.". A Monday order from U.S. District Judge Roy Altman to Alejandro Brito and his co-counsel Edward A. Paltzik and Daniel Z. Epstein contemplated a scenario in which the Trump-appointed jurist could grant the British Broadcasting Corporation's pending motion to dismiss by treating it as "unopposed."

Law&Crime previously reported on a joint request from Trump and the BBC to set a discovery hearing, one that would in part address virtually the "same records" former special counsel Jack Smith pursued against Trump to prosecute him for Jan. 6. The theory of Trump's lawsuit is that the BBC should be on the hook for some $10 billion because "Trump: A Second Chance," a Panorama documentary, "falsely depicted" him telling his supporters, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

The BBC admitted that the documentary "gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action" by editing together "excerpts from different points in the speech" out of sequence. When the lawsuit followed nonetheless, the BBC moved to throw out the "entire" case for failing to state a claim and for jurisdictional defects. Further, the BBC sought documents it said would tend to show that it's substantially true that Trump "fomented the violence" on Jan. 6.

To that end, the defendants dug in on discovery, subpoenaing 47 third parties — including Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner — for "[a]ll Documents and Communications Concerning the attack on the U.S. Capitol following the 'Stop the Steal' rally on January 6, 2021" and all the documents the parties provided to or received from the Jan. 6 Committee, Smith, congressional committees, among other entities. Trump's legal team was supposed to file its response to the BBC's dismissal motion on Friday. But the filing never came, the judge noticed, and now there's a mess to clean up.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/judge-orders-trump-lawyers-to-explain-why-they-shouldnt-be-sanctioned-for-blowing-off-key-deadline-in-presidents-own-defamation-lawsuit/