The BBC has demanded that Donald Trump hand over his personal text messages in a £10bn (£7.5bn) defamation lawsuit over his alleged involvement in the January 6 riots in Washington.
The broadcaster’s lawyers are seeking to prove in court that the US president should be held responsible for encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol following his 2020 election defeat.
In their legal document, the BBC said: “In [his] lawsuit, President Trump claims that the BBC defamed him by editing his speech at the White House Ellipse on January 6, 2021 in a manner that he claims conveyed the allegedly false implication that he fomented the violence that followed at the Capitol.
“Thus, as the BBC explained and the government does not dispute, President Trump cannot prevail in his case if he cannot establish the falsity of that alleged implication.”
How does one “hand over” “personal” text messages?
Aren’t all texts “personal”? And do people keep them on something else than their phone?
Or does someone like POTUS have a special phone with forensic-level text message backups?
typically (and in a system with people acting in good faith) a public servant of high enough office to require record keeping would have a public phone and a personal phone. the public phone would have all its messaging recorded, and all the emails and texts and phone calls for the public servant’s office would go through that, not their personal phone. haven’t had a system full of people acting in good faith in a while.
My understanding is that all of a President’s communications are supposed to be archived acording to the Presidential Records Act, but trump has consistently ignored it.
You’d hope so, but this moron probably uses a BlackBerry he refuses to give up and, as with everything else, they all just said “fuck it” and let him do what he wants so he shuts the fuck up.