Sure, the court can threaten sanctions and fines against the party not turning over documents, but this is a civil case. It’s not like the judge will file a warrant and send police to collect the documents.

Discovery is, where the rubber meets the road, a voluntary process. Alex Jones refused to cooperate with discovery in his defamation trial, and the plaintiffs just didn’t get any documents from him during the trial. At all.

It went very poorly for him, because refusal to cooperate means you’ll lose very badly (Alex Jones is now liable for billions in damages to the Sandy Hook plaintiffs because of his refusal to cooperate) but the court cannot force you to produce documents in a civil case. They’ll just give the other party exactly what they’re asking for.

It’s just almost always in your best interest to comply.

Which is why refusing to cooperate is so rare.

The running theory is that he refused to cooperate because the trial wasn’t sealed, so documents would end up in the public eye, and we assume that those documents getting published would be more damaging to him than the billions he is now liable for.

And that’s my theory of what will happen here. The specific things the BBC is wanting in discovery could be very damaging to Trump politically, and it could be that losing this court case in spectacular fashion like Alex Jones did is the less damaging outcome for him.

We shall see, but I can’t wait for Mango Mussolini to fall back into spray tan obscurity.

They can just do what Alex Jones did in his defamation trail and refuse to cooperate with discovery. The court can’t make them turn over documents at gunpoint, but the court can threaten to tell the jury that one party refused to cooperate, and to assume the evidence would be very bad for the party refusing to turn it over.

It’s basically giving the other party carte blanche to say whatever they want because you’re admitting you won’t back anything up. So the discovery has to be pretty bad for someone to refuse to cooperate.