The UK’s Culture Secretary said the BBC is “absolutely confident” of protection from a defamation lawsuit after apologizing to U.S. President Donald Trump over a misleading edit of a speech Trump gave on January 6 2021.

The BBC issued its apology on Thursday but said it had not defamed the president, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat.

“They (the BBC) have consulted lawyers and are absolutely confident that they are protected against defamation,” UK Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, said on Friday.

“That doesn't mean to say for a moment that they don't accept that there was a serious mistake here,” she added.

The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.

The publicly funded broadcaster said there are no plans to rebroadcast the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that came almost an hour apart.

“We accept that our edit 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," the BBC wrote in a retraction.

Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.

While the BBC statement doesn’t respond to Trump’s demand that he be compensated for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm," the headline on its news story about the apology said it refused to pay compensation.

The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” broadcast days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Director-General Tim Davie, along with news chief Deborah Turness, quit Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”

The letter from Trump's lawyer demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary along with other “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.

Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the case to court in the U.K. or the U.S. They said that the BBC could show that Trump wasn’t harmed because he was ultimately elected president in 2024.