Former Trump White House Lawyer Predicts President Will ‘Walk Out’ of Deposition in Defamation Case

Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney during President Donald Trump’s first term, said there is no way the president will sit for a deposition after a judge ordered him to do so.

Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion in December, alleging the U.K. broadcasting giant gave the “mistaken impression” in a documentary it aired shortly before the 2024 election that Trump had called for violence shortly before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The film, Panaroma, spliced together two clips in which the president said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

Rather than settle, as ABC and CBS did when Trump sued those organizations, the BBC is fighting the lawsuit. On Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett ordered the president to sit for a deposition after lawyers for the BBC noted that they “still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff” with just two months remaining in discovery.

Cobb joined Thursday’s OutFront on CNN, where Erin Burnett asked if Trump’s litigious ways are backfiring on him in the case.

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

“Oh it’s backfired,” Cobb replied. “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. The BBC’s lawyers are doing the right thing. 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 contests the way that they edited actual excerpts of his January 6th exhortation for an insurrection. And he didn’t like the way they pieced it together. So, he complained about it, hoping that 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.”

Burnett noted that the judge backed a subpoena for membership records at Mar-a-Lago and asked, “What might that reveal?”

Cobb offered his assessment, but predicted that the matter could be moot because Trump will refuse to be deposed:

So, it’s not really clear what that will reveal other than it will go somewhat to, how much was Trump really damaged? And that’s a very narrow subset of what will be explored in the, 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 that the plaintiffs are entitled to and receive his full testimony.

Watch above via CNN.

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