Donald Trump sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action, amid a deepening crisis at Britain’s main public broadcaster over its coverage of his administration.

The move, first reported by BBC News Monday lunchtime, comes a day after the resignation of the broadcaster’s director general and its most senior news executive. The pair had come under fire over coverage of the U.S. president’s remarks on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day rioters breached the U.S. Congress.

A BBC spokesperson said Monday: “We will review the letter and respond directly in due course.” Details of the legal letter were not immediately available.

Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness both announced their exits from the corporation Sunday night, after a week of torrid headlines questioning the broadcaster’s political impartiality, and a series of direct attacks from figures on the right of British politics — and Trump’s own team.

Trump and his press spokesperson Karoline Leavitt — who accused the BBC of peddling “fake news” — have already praised the departures on social media, with Trump saying Sunday night that the two executives were “very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.”

BBC apology

Last week the right-leaning Telegraph newspaper published a memo written by Michael Prescott, the BBC’s former standards advisor, covering a range of alleged failings in its content. That included its coverage of transgender issues, the war in Gaza, and Trump’s presidency.

The most damning claim was that footage in the Panorama show had been selectively edited to suggest the U.S. president had told supporters in January 2021: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.” 

The words were in fact spliced from sections of the speech almost an hour apart, and omitted a section in which Trump had said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

The U.K. public broadcaster is bound by its governing charter to avoid “favoring one side over another,” and is no stranger to claims from all political sides in the U.K. that it sometimes fails to do so.

But the significant escalation in attacks on the BBC from the right comes just as U.K. ministers prepare to review the broadcaster’s funding model.

Davie’s exit statement, issued Sunday night, acknowledged there had been “some mistakes made and as Director-General I have to take ultimate responsibility.” On Monday the BBC’s chairman, Samir Shah, publicly apologized to the Trump administration over the coverage.

But in a letter to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, he dismissed as “simply not true” the suggestion Prescott, the former BBC standards advisor, had uncovered a host of problems the BBC had tried to “bury.”

Shah said the Trump documentary had been repeatedly discussed by the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, and that a flurry of complaints sent to the broadcaster in recent weeks had prompted “further reflection.”

“The conclusion of that deliberation is that we accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action,” he said in a letter to the committee. “The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgement.”

Asked in a BBC interview if the U.S. president — who has launched legal threats against a host of media outlets back home — is suing the broadcaster, Shah said: “I do not know that yet. But he’s a litigious fellow. So we should be prepared for all outcomes.”

BBC should be ‘strong and independent’

The British government — which has been at pains to build strong relations with Trump and has criticized some elements of the BBC’s coverage — appeared to row in behind the broadcaster Monday.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson told reporters that the corporation played “a vital role in an age of disinformation.” There is, the spokesperson said, “a clear argument for a robust, impartial British news service.” Asked if the BBC was, as Leavitt had claimed, peddling “100 percent fake news,” they said: “We support a strong and independent BBC.”

Others were more forthright. Nigel Farage, a chief U.K. critic of the broadcaster whose right-wing Reform UK is surging in the polls, told a London press conference Monday that he had spoken to a “fuming” Trump just before the weekend.

Farage said the BBC had been “institutionally biased for decades,” and had “stitched up” the U.S. president “on the eve of a national election.”

“What the BBC did was election interference,” he said.

Politico

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