AIN'T NO WAY

First-Term Trump Lawyer Makes Damning Prediction About $10B Lawsuit

How much does the president really want the pot of gold?

Donald Trump won’t play ball in his $10 billion lawsuit, a former lawyer for the president has claimed.

First-term White House attorney Ty Cobb appeared on CNN’s OutFront on Thursday and said there was no way the 80-year-old would sit through the entire deposition the BBC called for.

The British media titan is fighting back against the suit Trump brought against it over an episode of its show Panorama. On Thursday, the judge backed the corporation and ordered him to sit and be deposed by its lawyers.

LAYING DOWN THE GAVEL

Trump Suffers Stinging Defeat in $10B Suit He Filed Himself

Annabella Rosciglione

“So, Trump wants $10 billion. Now he’s being ordered to answer questions under oath,” host Erin Burnett said. “How much has this backfired on him?”

“Oh, it’s backfired,” Cobb said. “Trump, as we know, has sued multiple media outlets about stories that he didn’t like even though the reporting was truthful. Many of those outlets—domestic-owned outlets—overpaid Trump to try to curry favor with him.”

U.S. media giants ABC and CBS both settled with the president after they were sued by him.

ABC agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a case after anchor George Stephanopoulos said the president had been “found liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s civil case when the jury found him liable for sexual assault. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, also agreed to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit after he complained that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited. The money was designated for Trump’s future presidential library.

“The BBC’s lawyers are doing the right thing,” Cobb continued. “They’re defending, and they’re not going away. Trump has dragged it out. He’s the plaintiff in the case. He’s the one that invented these claims.”

He sued the BBC over its coverage of the 2024 election after it edited together clips his team says make it seem like he encouraged violence at the Capitol on January 6. Only two months of discovery remain in the case, and the broadcaster’s lawyers say they “still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff.”

Trump skipped a seven-hour deposition scheduled for October 16, citing a “matter of national importance.” However, he did have time that day to attend a rally in Dalton, Georgia.

He now must sit for a deposition on December 11 or face sanctions and the possibility that the case will be thrown out.

“He contests the way that they edited actual excerpts of his Jan. 6 exhortation for an insurrection. And he didn’t like the way they pieced it together. So he complained about it, hoping they would cave and pay him off, but they didn’t. And they’re trying to get his deposition, which they’re entitled to, or the case will be dismissed,” Cobb added.

The case also includes a BBC subpoena for membership records from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett has supported it, and Cobb says it all relates to the impact on Trump’s reputation.

“So, it’s not really clear what that will reveal other than it will go somewhat to how much was Trump really damaged?” he said. And that’s a very narrow subset of what will be explored in the deposition.

“You know, they can go into anything that affects Trump’s reputation, the reputation of his multiple bankruptcies, his business acumen. They will be able to go into all the personal issues from the 34 felonies to the Epstein files to the selling of pardons at this stage of the game.

“So, this will be wide-ranging, which is why Trump will never sit for it. He’s likely to refuse to go. If he does go, he’ll walk out in the middle, and the case will ultimately get dismissed unless the plaintiffs are entitled to and receive his full testimony.”

Cobb left Trump’s White House legal team in May 2018 with reports saying he disagreed with how aggressively Trump should fight Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Harry ThompsonNews Reporter

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.