SHOULD the BBC sue US president Donald Trump for $20 billion (£15.1bn) in the American courts for damaging its reputation?
Lawyers would say it has a strong case. The full text of Trump’s remarks1 on January 6, 2021, challenging the result of the perfectly legitimate presidential election of November 3, 2020, in which he was unseated by Joe Biden, is available.
Eastern Eye readers can make up their mind as to whether he egged on the crowd to attack the Capitol building where the election result was being confirmed.
Here, I declare an interest. I am a child of the BBC; I arrived in this country from Patna, the capital of Bihar, because my father, a newspaper editor, came to Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service in Aldwych, as head of Bengali. My mother and my two brothers and two sisters came with him. He returned to India after five years.
Crowds storm the US Capitol after the rally
As a schoolboy, I would often visit him at Bush House, where I would have lunch in the BBC canteen (this is where I was introduced to Bakewell tart served, as in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, with “lashings of custard”). Later, when I became a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, I would listen to the news on BBC World Service, with its distinctive signature tune, on my little Sony radio, even in the deserts of Iran.
The BBC is a huge organisation, where individuals do make mistakes, but to me – and millions around the world – it represents the best of British. I will always be proud of my father’s BBC connection. In my study at home, I have a black and white studio photograph of my late father sitting in front of an old-fashioned BBC microphone.
Panorama spliced together Trump quotes from his January 6 speech, but the sense of it seems to be still right – which is why he was impeached.
He first said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
The BBC office in London
More than 50 minutes later, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
Which is why violent riots happened, a British jury would probably find. Five people died, it’s worth remembering. Trump should have the generosity of spirit to withdraw his case against the BBC and treat critical media as his best friends.
But here are some extracts from Trump’s speech which would sustain legal action by the BBC. It does come across as rabble rousing.
1: “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by bold and radical left Democrats, which is what they are doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That is what they have done and what they are doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. (Applause) Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about.”
2: “Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election…. I have been in two elections. I won them both and the second one I won much bigger than the first, okay?”
3: “For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans. And that’s what they are. There’s so many weak Republicans.”
4: “We don’t have a fair media anymore. It’s suppression and you have to be very careful with that, and they’ve lost all credibility in this country. We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies that we’ve been forced to believe. Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election.”
5: “There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Now think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters….this is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud….Over 8,000 ballots in Pennsylvania were cast by people whose names and dates of birth match individuals who died in 2020 and prior to the election. Think of that. Dead people, lots of dead people, thousands, and some dead people actually requested an application.”
6: “The Republicans have to get tougher. You’re not going to have a Republican party if you don’t get tougher. They want to play so straight. They want to play so serious. ‘The United States, the Constitution doesn’t allow me to send them back to the states.’ Well, I would say yes, it does, because the Constitution says you have to protect our country, and you have to protect our Constitution, and you can’t vote on fraud, and fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.”
7: “It is also widely understood that the voter rolls are crammed full of noncitizens, felons, and people who have moved out of state, and individuals who are otherwise ineligible to vote, yet Democrats oppose every effort to clean up their voter rolls. They don’t want to clean them up. They are loaded, and how many people here are — know other people that when hundreds of thousands and then millions of ballots got sent out got three, four, five, six and I heard one who got seven ballots, and then they say you didn’t quite make it, sir. We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.”
8: “They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This is the most corrupt election in the history, maybe in the world. You know you could go to thirdworld countries, but I don’t think they had hundreds of thousands of votes, and they don’t have voters for them. I mean, no matter where you go, nobody would think this. In fact, it’s so egregious, it’s so bad that a lot of people don’t even believe it. It is so crazy that people don’t even believe it. It can’t be true. So they don’t believe it. This is not just a matter of domestic politics; this is a matter of national security. So today, in addition to challenging the certification of the election, I’m calling on Congress and the state legislatures to quickly pass sweeping election reforms, and you had better do it before we have no country left. Today is not the end; it’s just the beginning.”
9: “Together we will drain the Washington swamp, and we will clean up the corruption in our nation’s Capitol. We have done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy; it’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. We have a lot of bad people out there. Despite everything we have been through, looking out all over this country and seeing fantastic crowds, although this I think is our all-time record. But I said something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.
10: “So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue — I love Pennsylvania Avenue — and we are going to the Capitol. And we are going to try and give — the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote — but we are going to try to give our Republicans — the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
1. https://wehco.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/news/... Trump_Jan._6_speech.pdf
Sunder Katwala
