President Donald Trump has expanded his lawsuit against CBS, doubling the damages sought to $20 billion and adding CBS parent company Paramount Global as a defendant.
The amended complaint, filed on Feb. 7 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleges news distortion, election interference, and financial harm caused by CBS’s handling of its “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It is beyond dispute that Defendants wanted Harris to win the Election, and indeed political gain for Harris was certainly Defendants’ intent behind their tampering with the Interview,” the amended complaint reads. “But Defendants’ primary motivation was commercial and pecuniary gain.”
Trump’s legal team claims that CBS deceptively edited Harris’s responses to make her appear more articulate and composed, while also diverting viewership from Trump’s media platform, Truth Social, reducing ad revenue. The complaint asserts that CBS intentionally aired different portions of Harris’s remarks on “Face the Nation” and “60 Minutes,” misleading the public about her full statements.
“Once Defendants finally released the unedited version of the Interview, it became apparent that they had engaged in gross broadcast distortion cover-up and manipulated not only Harris’s Reply about Prime Minister Netanyahu, but the Interview in its entirety,” the amended complaint reads.
CBS has dismissed the claims and maintains its edits were standard journalistic practice.
“We are posting the same transcripts and videos of our interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that we provided to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission],” the network said in a Feb. 5 statement. “They show–consistent with 60 Minutes’ repeated assurances to the public–that the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful.”
CBS further stated that a longer portion of Harris’s response aired on Face the Nation while a shorter one aired on 60 Minutes for the sake of brevity.
Having seen the differences between the two airings, the word-salad-coverup was quite evident to me!
I would never have voter for Special-K anyway – but this presentation probably did actual damage to the campaign of President Trump…he should have won with a larger margin!