60 Minutes devoted two segments to an interview with President Trump conducted by Norah O’Donnell. O’Donnell harked back to Trump’s 2020 preelection interview with Lesley Stahl. In that interview Trump complained about the failure of the “fake media” to cover the Obama/Biden scandals. Stahl imperiously instructed Trump: “You know, this is 60 Minutes. And we can’t put on things we can’t verify…,” such as the stories extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which they were perfectly capable of verifying but preferred not to.
I have posted the interview as brodcast at the bottom. This is (still) 60 Minutes.
O’Donnell begins with the Schumer shutdown. She faithfully toes the Democrat Party line.
She takes up the issue of tariffs.
She presses Trump on whether the immigration raids have gone too far. She doesn’t mention that federal law enforcement has had to contend with violent resistance supported by prominent Democrat office officeholders.
She asks whether the indictment of James Comey, John Bolton, and Letitia James constitue political retribution. Trump responds indirectly: “You know who got indicted, the man you’re lookin’ at. I got indicted, and I was innocent.” Did 60 Minutes ever ask any Biden administration official about “political retribution” against Trump? I don’t think so.
Trump comments further: “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap. Otherwise I couldn’t have run for president. They tried to get me not to run for president by going after me and by indicting me.” I take it that a direct answer to the retribution question might be affirmative.
O’Donnell asks about Trump’s pardon of Binance guy “CZ” Zhao. Trump purports not to know anything about him: “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.” It sounds like a Biden autopen kind of situation. O’Donnell doesn’t say that, of course, but she pursued it in an unaired portion of the interview as a corruption issue.
Trump actually knows about Zhao, as is apparent in the full transcript of the interview that CBS News has posted online (video here). O’Donnell raised the Zhao case at the very end of the interview. (Trump did in fact mention the Biden autopen issue in an unaired portion of the interview.)
O’Donnell concludes the broadcast interview by asking Trump about a possible third term. I’m thinking “This is 60 Minutes. [They] can’t put on things [they] can’t verify,” but there you have it.
