Trump Is Flat-Out Lying About the 60 Minutes Interview With Harris
The full transcript shows the president's complaints about the editing of the interview are not just wildly hyperbolic and legally groundless. They are demonstrably false.
CBS has finally released the full transcript of the interview with Kamala Harris that 60 Minutes aired on October 7, which provoked a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against the network a few weeks later. The same interview is also the focus of an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has the power to nix a pending merger between Paramount, the network's owner, and Skydance Media by declining to approve the transfer of broadcast licenses.
After the interview aired, Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee facing off against Harris in the 2024 election, described it as "Election Interference," an "UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL," and "a giant Fake News Scam" that was "totally illegal." By editing the interview to make Harris "look better," he said, CBS had committed an offense so egregious that the FCC should "TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE" (by which he presumably meant the broadcast licenses held by CBS-owned stations). The transcript confirms what you may have suspected: Trump's characterization of the interview is completely bonkers. It is Trump, not CBS, who is perpetrating "a giant Fake News Scam."
It was already clear that the editing of the interview did not constitute consumer fraud, as Trump alleges in his lawsuit, or "broadcast news distortion"—the claim that the FCC is considering. But the transcript also makes it clear, beyond any serious dispute, that CBS did not commit any journalistic sins when it presented an edited version of Harris' response to a question about Israel.
The transcript validates the network's argument that it was engaging in standard journalistic practice by using a more "succinct" segment of Harris' response to the Israel question than the one that was featured in a preview on Face the Nation the day before. And it shows that Trump has not only absurdly exaggerated what happened (as is his wont); he has flagrantly misrepresented the nature of the editing and continues to do so.
"CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before," Trump averred on X today. "They 100% removed Kamala's horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview. This was Election changing 'stuff,' Election Interference and, quite simply, Election Fraud at a level never seen before. CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable 'NEWS' show should be immediately terminated….This will go down as the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!!"
The idea that making Harris seem a bit more cogent (or less "CRAZY" and "DUMB," as Trump put it in October) could have been "election changing" was always silly, all the more so in light of Trump's victory, which was by no means close in the Electoral College. But Trump is simply lying when he says 60 Minutes "replaced" Harris' answer with a "completely different" answer "taken from another part of the interview."
When correspondent Bill Whitaker suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "not listening" to the Biden administration's concerns about the war in Gaza and had "rebuffed just about all of your administration's entreaties," here is how Harris responded:
Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. And we're not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
The Face the Nation promo used the first sentence, while the interview as aired on 60 Minutes used the last sentence. In other words, the latter show's producers were telling the truth when they said they had used the "same question" and the "same answer" but "a different portion of the response."
Harris did not come across as especially forthright, articulate, or intelligent in either version, although the one that 60 Minutes showed was a little more concise. This is what Trump thinks (or claims to think) amounted to "a giant Fake News Scam" and "the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History."
After Trump sued CBS, the network insisted that "the interview was not doctored" and noted that 60 Minutes "did not hide any part of Vice President Kamala Harris's answer to the question at issue." After all, Trump was aware of this supposed "SCANDAL" only because CBS aired both parts of her response. The full transcript removes any doubt about who is telling the truth in this case and who is just making shit up.
Trump's lawsuit claims that CBS "cross[ed] the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news." Even if that were true, it would not qualify as consumer fraud under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, as the lawsuit asserts, for reasons I explained in detail last week. Trump did not suffer any cognizable damages under that statute, let alone damages amounting to "at least" $10 billion, as he risibly claims.
In fact, however, CBS did not engage in "deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news," which means it cannot possibly be guilty of broadcast news distortion, which requires "evidence showing that the broadcast news report was deliberately intended to mislead viewers or listeners." When the FCC rejected that claim last month, Jessica Rosenworcel, its Biden-appointed chairwoman, rightly said "the FCC should not be the President's speech police" or "journalism's censor-in-chief." But her Trump-appointed replacement, Brendan Carr, whose avowed dedication to freedom of speech and freedom of the press is curiously selective, revived the complaint and has indicated that it will figure in the FCC's review of the deal between Paramount and Skydance.
Carr's interest in reconsidering the frivolous complaint against CBS in this context is a chilling illustration of how executive power can be abused in service of the president's personal vendettas. It helps explain why Paramount is keen to appease Trump by settling his laughable lawsuit, which CBS accurately described as "completely without merit."
The FCC complaint is equally groundless. As Nathan Simington, another Trump-appointed FCC commissioner, noted in October, "broadcast news distortion is an extraordinarily narrow complaint category." He added that "CBS could easily remove the predicate for any further discussion by releasing the transcript" of the Harris interview. Carr himself said something similar around the same time. "In my view," he told Glenn Beck, "the best way forward" would be to "release the transcript," which would mean "there's no reason to have this before the FCC."
Now that CBS has released the transcript, it should be obvious to Carr that 60 Minutes did nothing close to intentional misrepresentation or deliberate distortion of the news. But in truth, there was "no reason to have this before the FCC" at all. Based on the constitutionally dubious distinction between broadcast journalism and journalism in every other medium, the commission is second-guessing editorial judgments that are indisputably protected by the First Amendment, even when they are sloppy, mistaken, irresponsible, or unethical—none of which is true in this case.
The FCC is scrutinizing CBS at the behest of a vindictive president who reflexively alleges nonexistent torts, crimes, or regulatory violations based on news coverage he views as unfair to him. Trump's petty, wildly hyperbolic grievances do not deserve a respectful hearing from any rational person, let alone from a government agency with the power to punish news outlets for journalism that irks him.
