Main: President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart Joint Base Andrews, Md., Friday, May 23, 2025 (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta). Right inset: U.S. District Judge Roy Altman (U.S. Attorney”s Office for the Southern District of Florida).
A Florida attorney who is representing former President Donald Trump in several defamation cases has been summoned to justify why he should not face penalties for allegedly ignoring court deadlines.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman issued an order to Alejandro Brito, alongside his co-counsel Edward A. Paltzik and Daniel Z. Epstein, suggesting the possibility of granting the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) motion to dismiss by considering it unopposed.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Trump and the BBC had jointly requested a discovery hearing to examine some of the “same records” sought by former special counsel Jack Smith in the prosecution related to the January 6th events.
Trump’s lawsuit claims that the BBC owes him $10 billion because the Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance” misrepresented him. The documentary allegedly portrayed him saying, “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 has acknowledged that the documentary inadvertently suggested Trump called for violent action by editing together parts of his speech out of order, which was misleading.
Despite this, Trump proceeded with the lawsuit, prompting the BBC to seek a dismissal by arguing that the case lacks substantial grounds and suffers from jurisdictional flaws. Additionally, the BBC requested documents they believe would demonstrate that their portrayal of Trump’s role in the January 6th violence is essentially true.
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.
“Rather than timely file his response, the Plaintiff filed two eleventh-hour procedural motions the day his response was due,” Altman said in a paperless order. “Neither motion explained why the Plaintiff delayed so long in seeking the requested relief or asked that we extend the response deadline pending our adjudication of the motions.”
“And, as of this writing, the Plaintiff has missed the deadline to file his response,” the judge added.
As a result, the judge ordered Trump’s lawyers to explain by Wednesday “whether we should consider the Motion to Dismiss unopposed” and “why we shouldn’t sanction the Plaintiff’s counsel for their apparent disregard of court deadlines.”
