Doing a Solid For Trump

Donald Trump was right about two things.

When CBS' 60 Minutes aired an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during last year's campaign, Trump argued that CBS should not have edited her answer about the Israel-Hamas war. He believed the network's parent company, Paramount, would cave to his demands.  He sued the latter corporation for $20 billion and it settled for $16 million, a hefty fee for exercising a freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Editing any interview can be misleading and editing one of a major party presidential candidate or of a President does the public a disservice.

When CBS aired on Sunday evening an interview with Donald, it showed on air only 28 of the 73 minutes taped.. The Trump campaign should be relieved it did so.

That's not primarily because Donald made a fool of himself on the 45 minute portion, which was far less than the 74 minute video CBS aired online. (According to CBS' senior correspondent Norah O'Donnell, who conducted the interview, the exchange itself ran for almost 90 minutes) .Trump typically makes a fool of himself, which is of little import because he is wrapped in a layer of Teflon unequaled in American history.

One of Trump's most interesting critics, former US Representative from Illinois, understands:

On this @60Minutes interview. Trump lies as he breathes. He lies every time he opens his mouth. We’ve never ever faced this before. And the media still has no fucking clue how to deal with it. It is pointless to interview him if you don’t fact check his lies. It’s just pointless.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) November 3, 2025

 O'Donnell did check Trump's facts periodically. However, she was was stymied, whether by Paramount, CBS News, from informing the interviewee and the viewers in most of the cases in which the President made an untruthful remark.

CNN posted an article, read by relatively few people, by its fact-checker extraordinaire, Daniel Dale. cited six examples of Trump citing "fictional" numbers and added "Trump made a variety of additional false claims on several subjects, including the government shutdown, the artificial intelligence boom, tariffs, his first impeachment and his former legal battle with '60 Minutes' itself."

But we're used to that. The man's lips move, he lies. However, during her time with Trump, O'Donnell asked about at least 16 topics: tariffs, artificial intelligence, the stock market, grocery prices, inflation, Taiwan, nuclear weapons testing, Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Venezuela, Israel/Gaza, Abraham Accords, Israel, the government shutdown, health care, the filibuster. There may have been more but it's hard to focus attention properly during, or on, a trainwreck.

If an interviewer jumps from subject to subject, victory goes to the road team. Almost all successful public figures, especially Trump, hit a home run/score a touchdown/execute a slam dunk when the questioner does not hone in on an answer. O'Donnell tried, but was expected (or, less likely, decided on her own) to hit on nearly every possible topic.

And so President Trump gets to flood the zone with lies, accusations, half-truths, and more lies. An after the fact review of Donald's statements, such as undertaken by Daniel Dale, is necessary but not sufficient. Trump can make false, sometimes vicious, statements willy-nilly with little pushback because the interviewer wants to cover yet another topic. The result, in part, is that the interviewee controls the interview.

On one occasion, O'Donnell stated "I know our time with you is limited. I hear you." She said at another time  "and I know my time is- is limited with you so I want to be respectful- of you."  And of course "I know your time is limited so I do want to make sure I get through another- more of these topics."  She stopped just short of apologizing to Trump for limiting his time to get his talking points out.

The networks do the American people no favor if they bring on Donald Trump, only to allow him to ramble, talking about anything he feels like. Giving Donald Trump a platform to promote his propaganda is worse than doing no interview at all.

           

Share |

Then What About Russia?

J.D. Vance is right. and not only in the manner in which he suggests.

If 60 Minutes had an ounce of integrity, they would release the full, unedited interview.

The person who can't answer basic questions about national security wants to be our next president. Show us what she actually said, in full. https://t.co/E7iMpnZcoV

— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 10, 2024

 

If CBS News does have integrity, it will release the full, unedited interview. The media should leave it to the individual campaigns to edit remarks by their opponents. Notwithstanding Donald Trump's claim(s), it is not illegal or an example of "fake news," however that's defined. However, it is not the responsibility of a news outlet to do the messaging of either the candidate or the opponent of the candidate.

Of course, 60 Minutes and much of the broadcast media omit portions of an interview from that which is telecast. However, this is a candidate for office, the most important one in the land, and everything said by the interviewer and interviewee should be telecast. If that's not done- whether it makes the candidate look better or worse- the interview shouldn't be shown at all.

             

So Vance is right about CBS ethical obligation to release the full interview and the importance of a presidential candidate to "answer basic questions about national security." Unfortunately, Donald Trump, refusing to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes, chose not to answer or even entertain questions about national security or anything else. Kamala Harris deserves a passing grade for effort and Donald Trump a failing grade for the same.

However, of greater importance than balking, thus far, at releasing portions edited out of an interview is failure to release 

In his new book, War, Bob Woodward has reported that

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

The deal having been down on the down low, Putin wisely cautioned Trump to keep his mouth shut about the transcription.  America First! The collaboration continued post-Trump presidency as

Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.

The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.

Trump may have violated the Logan Act, for which he would not be prosecuted if elected and for which he would not be prosecuted if defeated. Of more immediate concern-- more critical than Kamala Harris' answer about Israel- is whether Woodward's rendering is accurate and, if so, who initiated the calls and what was discussed.  A lawyer and former FBI agent understands

The thing no one is talking about with regard to Trump's Pooty calls over the last several years is that not only do we not know what they talked about, it's almost certain that Russia has recordings of them. Which means they have leverage. (I know, what's new, but still.)

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) October 9, 2024

J.D. Vance believes a vague, somewhat meandering answer about national security should be

Failure to air  a vague, somewhat meandering answer about national security by a presidential nominee is irresponsible. Ignoring a credible report about a liaison of a presidential nominee with Vladimir Putin is irresponsible and deeply dangerous.

  

 

Share |

Our NSA, Its 60 Minutes


First citing the inaccurate Benghazi report and the puff piece interview of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Politico's Dylan Byers recognizes "CBS '60 Minutes' has had a terrible year." In another piece, he reports

Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the '60 Minutes' journalists who were put on a leave of absence following their now-retracted report on Benghazi, are set to return to the program early next year, POLITICO has learned.

Logan and her producer, who had unfinished projects in the works when they left in November, have started booking camera crews for news packages, network sources said. Their return could come as early as next month.

Digby comments

In case you are wondering what Dan Rather is up to these days, you can find him doing interesting long form reporting at AXSTV. He is persona non grata at the Tiffany network. After all, he relied on a bad source about an inconsequential story from 40 years ago, which is unforgivable. Logan will still have the most vaunted news program in history pushing her shallow jigoistic drivel --- whether it's true or not. 

"60 Minutes," as Heather Digby Parton and probably Byers realize, is a shell of its former self.  The latter notes the interview (transcript, here) the program ran Sunday night of NSA Director Keith Alexander by John Miller "has been roundly criticized for a litany of issues, from Miller's conflicts of interest to his softball questions to the absence of any input from NSA critics."

One of General Alexander's major objectives was to damp down the criticism of the agency's collection of metadata, defined by Miller as "the digital information on the number dialed, the time and date, and the frequency of the calls."  So Alexander claimed

 "We need to help the American people understand what we're doing and why we're doing it." And to put it simply, we're doing two things: We're defending this country from future terrorist attacks and we're defending our civil liberties and privacy. There's no reason that we would listen to the phone calls of Americans. There’s no intelligence value in that. There's no reason that we'd want to read their email. There is no intelligence value in that.

That is one of the arguments eviscerated in the takedown of the interview by Spencer Ackerman, who explains

When Miller said the bulk metadata collection “sounds like spying on Americans”, Alexander replied: “Right, and that’s wrong. That’s absolutely wrong.”

Notice the tension here. It’s the metadata – who you called, who called you, for how long, how frequently you communicate – that has intelligence value, not, in Alexander’s telling, what you actually say on the phone. The NSA is relying for its defense on a public conception of surveillance as the interception of the content of your communications, even while it’s saying that what’s actually important is your network of connections – which the agency is very, very interested in collecting.

Senator Ron Wyden, an intelligence committee member who has emerged as a leading opponent of bulk collection, says the metadata provides NSA with a “human relations database”. For many, surveillance occurs when someone else collects anything on their interactions, movements, or communications, rather than when that other party collects certain kinds of information. And it hardly makes sense to say, as Alexander did, that surveillance on Americans doesn’t occur when NSA collects the sort of information that it believes actually has intelligence value.

Six months ago, Jane Mayer wrote of her conversation about metadata with Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, who stated

“The public doesn’t understand.  It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Another claim examined by Alexander pertained to a "BIOS plot," which he describes as "an attempt by China to launch malicious code in the guise of a firmware update that would have targeted computers apparently linked to the US financial system, rendering them pieces of junk."  Alexander maintains

The lack of specificity made cybersecurity expert Robert David Graham dubious that the plot NSA claimed to discover matched the one it described on TV. “All they are doing is repeating what Wikipedia says about BIOS,” Graham blogged, “acting as techie talk layered onto the discussion to make it believable, much like how Star Trek episodes talk about warp cores and Jeffries Tubes.”

Did someone mention Star Trek? It is unclear whether Graham was aware (photo below via Glenn Greenwald, text from Foreign Policy's "The Cowboy of the NSA")

When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather "captain's chair" in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard," says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.

This is the guy now in charge of an agency which is collecting information on phone calls of every American. And 60 Minutes, once the gold standard of TV news, continues its descent.

Share |

A Classic Moment

I don't believe in guilt by association but.... to all those who haven't drunk the Obama Kool-Aid, who wonder if the tens of thousands of individuals who come out to a Barack rally to cheer his applause lines, to swoon and sometimes faint, know what they're actually entranced with, comes one of the Democratic presidential campaign's most curious events.

It happened at the senator's speech, following his 9.4% loss to Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, in a YouTube moment.

Here is Jonathan Alter's description (under "Who Are The Obama Abercrombie Guys?):

If you were watching Obama's concession speech last night then you saw them: Three guys standing two rows behind the candidate in what is usually a carefully-selected backdrop of loyal sign-waving supporters, each sporting t-shirts clearly bearing the logos of Abercrombie & Fitch. During Obama's speech, they waved their signs dutifully but also clearly communicated with each other; at one point, one of them blackberried. Obama's speech was great as usual (and nice line to slip in there about 4-or-8 years!) but it was distracting to see that huge "FITCH" in the background and see the trio of average-looking dudes bobbing behind his head. Who were they and what were they doing there?

No one knows whether this was product placement by Abercrombie & Fitch (which has denied it), a plant by the Obama campaign (which has denied it), or a prank by three guys who had shopped together (or drunk together). But we do know something about Abercrombie & Fitch Co. In an (11/24/04) article on the CBS News website describing a piece broadcast on 60 Minutes, we read that a lawsuit had been filed against the chain, charged with firing, or refusing to hire, young people "because their look was not consistent with the store's look." The lawsuit, according to the report, "alleges that Abercrombie hires a disproportionately white sales force, favors white employees for the best positions, and discourages minorities from even applying for jobs."

And what was the store's look?

It's dominated by Caucasian, football-looking, blonde-hair, blue-eyed males; skinny, tall," says Lu. "You don't see any African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and that's the image that they're portraying and that they're looking for."

Liu says she was fired after corporate officials visited the store, and, according to her, didn't like what they saw: "A corporate official had pointed to an Abercrombie poster and told our management at our store, 'You need to have more staff that looks like this.' And it was a white Caucasian male on that poster."

In an update, CBS News reported "Abercrombie & Fitch settled the class action suit against it for $40 million. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to create an office of diversity, and to recruit more black, Latino and Asian employees."

So three guys go to an Obama speech and celebrate a clothing chain, giving it free advertising. And it's a company which, until it was stopped by determined ex- (or would-be) employees who filed a lawsuit, discriminated not only against non-white employeees and potential employees, but perhaps even against all those who did not fit the Nazi racial ideal. And that is the operation these Obamites think is oh, so cool- one which avoided hiring anybody who looked remotely like a Barack Obama.