Former US President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News on Thursday, alleging that the television network edited an interview with Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes that painted her in a positive light, according to media outlets.
The suit was filed in US District Court in the Northern District of Texas and alleges that CBS engaged in “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion.”
It centers around two video clips of an October interview 60 Minutes conducted with Harris. One clip was edited to include a longer section of her response about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, with the lawsuit contending that the editing decision was meant to intentionally assist Harris and mislead the public while putting Trump at an unfair disadvantage.
“To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” the former president’s attorneys claimed in court papers.
CBS News was quick to defend itself against the allegations of the lawsuit, which seeks $10 billion in damages, saying Trump’s claims are “completely without merit.”
“Former President Trump’s repeated claims against 60 Minutes are false,” CBS News said in a statement. “The interview was not doctored, and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue. 60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
“The lawsuit Trump has brought today against CBS is completely without merit, and we will vigorously defend against it,” the statement continued.
Trump and his Republican allies have criticized CBS News for editing the clip to be biased in Harris’s favor, but it is standard practice for broadcast news outlets to edit questions and answers during interviews for accuracy and time constraints, as it is not possible to air an entire interview during a standard news broadcast.
Trump initially agreed to sit down for a similar interview with 60 Minutes, but CBS said the former president backed out after the program said it would fact-check his answers.
Trump hinted earlier this month of a potential lawsuit against CBS, saying the network “should lose their license and take 60 Minutes off the air.”
Filing lawsuits against mainstream news outlets is nothing new for Trump. In addition to the CBS suit, he filed a defamation case last March against ABC News about a question he was asked during an interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Trump has previously lost lawsuits against CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The CBS News lawsuit comes just days before Harris and Trump face off in the 2024 US presidential election, which takes place next Tuesday, Nov. 5.
