BBC apologizes in writing and declines to send a check; the President's lawyer goes on television anyway.

The BBC sent a letter on Thursday, on letterhead, signed by the Chair of the corporation’s board, addressed to the President of the United States, formally apologizing for the editorial decisions of the Panorama program that produced the misleading edit. The letter acknowledged the error. It expressed regret. It thanked the President for raising the matter. It also said, in a separate paragraph, in a polite English register that did not sound polite when read out loud, that the corporation would not be paying any compensation, because in the corporation’s view there was no actionable legal harm and the apology already on the record was a sufficient remedy under English defamation law.

The President’s personal attorney, a different attorney from the White House Counsel’s office, went on Fox News on Thursday evening and demanded one billion dollars. He went on Fox News on Friday morning and demanded five billion. The number, between the two appearances, multiplied by five.

This is the architecture worth noting. The legal claim against the BBC is being prosecuted not by the United States government but by a private law firm working for an individual who happens to be the President. The claim is being litigated in American courts, against a British public broadcaster, for editorial decisions made and disclaimed in Britain. The forum-shopping is the strategy.

The BBC, as a corporation, has done what corporations do when they have made a mistake: it apologized, it identified the responsible parties, it accepted the resignations of the two officers who oversaw the program, and it published the internal review. There is no further private remedy available except money. The money is what the lawsuit is for.

A presidential libel suit against a foreign public broadcaster, prosecuted by personal counsel, for editorial decisions already disclaimed and corrected, is not a remedy. It is a posture. The posture is “I will sue you for editing me badly even after you have apologized.” The posture is also “I will accept the trillion-dollar pledge from a regime whose intelligence service murdered a Washington Post columnist on Tuesday.” The two postures are held in the same week, by the same administration, and they are not in tension because they are, in this administration, the same posture: the posture of a man who treats every adversary as a transaction and every transaction as a billing.

Calmly documenting the decline.