President Donald Trump has asked a federal judge to reject the BBC’s request for the court’s help in securing testimony and documents from three family members as part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.

In a court filing Friday, the president’s personal lawyers argued that the BBC is trying to gain “politically-driven leverage” over Trump by serving subpoenas on his daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and son Donald Trump Jr.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz in Miami did not immediately rule on the dispute. Kuntz, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, inherited the president’s lawsuit from another judge less than a week ago. Court filings did not immediately specify a reason for the case’s reassignment. The previous judge had set a February trial date.

According to the president’s lawyers, a process server working for the BBC tried in May to serve subpoenas on Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their residence but encountered Secret Service agents who said they were not authorized to accept them. The lawyers said the process server also visited Trump Tower in New York several days later in a failed attempt to serve Donald Trump Jr. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, subpoenas are generally served by delivering a copy to the person named, so parties who cannot complete hand delivery — for example, to people under Secret Service protection — typically need a judge to authorize an alternative method such as certified mail.

In a court filing last week, the broadcaster asked the court for permission to serve subpoenas on Trump’s family members by certified mail instead of in person. Kuntz’s ruling on that request is the next procedural step in a case that remains pointed at the February trial date set by his predecessor.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed in December, accuses the BBC of deceptively editing portions of the speech he delivered near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. The suit claims the BBC spliced together separate parts of Trump’s speech to intentionally misrepresent what he said.

The lawsuit alleges the BBC aired its documentary a week before the 2024 presidential election in “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the outcome to Trump’s detriment.

“The relief that the BBC’s Motion seeks cannot be segregated from the politically charged discovery campaign that it is based on, and which has already been ruled as improperly overbroad by this Court,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

The BBC operates under a royal charter and is funded chiefly by the U.K. television licence fee rather than by advertisers or shareholders. The broadcaster has apologized to Trump for the misleading edit, but it denies defaming him.

As a public official, Trump faces a demanding legal standard on his defamation claim: under U.S. Supreme Court precedent dating to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in 1964, public officials and public figures must show a publisher acted with “actual malice” — knowing a statement was false or publishing it with reckless disregard for the truth.

The case is also part of a broader run of Trump litigation against major media organizations. He previously settled defamation-related claims against ABC News and Meta, his $10 billion suit against CBS over its 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris was settled by Paramount in 2025 while the company awaited U.S. regulatory approval of its merger with Skydance, and he separately sued pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over a preelection Iowa survey that showed Harris ahead before Trump carried the state comfortably. Press-freedom groups have criticized the wave of lawsuits as pressure on newsrooms, while Trump and his allies describe them as accountability for biased coverage.

Source: Fortune