The BBC urged a federal judge on Monday to prevent Donald Trump from conducting an extensive search for information before the UK public service broadcaster attempts to have the former president’s defamation lawsuit dismissed. The lawsuit concerns purportedly misleading edits in a January 6 documentary, which the BBC asserts is unrelated to Florida.

In a detailed 21-page document, the BBC argued that Trump’s legal action against the Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance” should be dismissed due to a fundamental jurisdictional issue. The defendants pointed out that the documentary was neither created, produced, nor broadcast in Florida, thus questioning the jurisdiction of U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman, who was appointed by Trump, to preside over the case.

The BBC requested Judge Altman to halt any substantial discovery related to the merits of the case, advocating instead for a limited inquiry focused on jurisdictional matters.

The defendants maintain that the January 6 documentary in question is unrelated to Florida, and therefore, Trump should not be permitted to make extensive and “objectionable” discovery requests unless he can prove the case was filed in the correct jurisdiction.

The filing expressed concern that the complaint implies Trump intends to pursue extensive discovery related to the BBC’s coverage of him over the past decade, potentially claiming damage to his business and political reputation. Given the nature of Trump’s allegations, the defendants argue that jurisdictional issues should be settled before any discovery on the case’s merits takes place, as it might lead to inevitable legal disputes.

Evidently, Trump’s legal team “rejected” this order of discovery operations, leading the BBC to move for a stay and to tip its hand as to its self-proclaimed “clearly meritorious” motion to dismiss that would “dispose of the entire case.”

“As the Motion to Dismiss will show, exercising personal jurisdiction over Defendants would violate Florida law and constitutional due process protections,” the filing previewed.

Citing the Supreme Court’s landmark defamation precedent New York Times v. Sullivan, the BBC said Trump, a public figure and official, “fails to plausibly allege” actual malice.

While the president has claimed the documentary was edited to create a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech from the Ellipse — amounting to a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 election — the BBC counters that Trump can’t show “any cognizable injury,” even though it offered an apology.

At issue is an edit in the documentary that stitched together different parts of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech that, by the BBC’s own admission, “unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”

Trump’s complaint said the documentary “falsely depicted” Trump telling the crowd that would become a mob, “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.”

“President Trump never uttered this sequence of words,” the complaint said — and the BBC acknowledged.