Trump Lawyers Claim ‘60 Minutes' Harris Interview Caused Him ‘Mental Anguish,' Argue That the ‘First Amendment Is No Shield to News Distortion' in Motion to Deny Paramount Bid to Dismiss Lawsuit
Trump filed the lawsuit against CBS just days before the 2024 presidential election, alleging the '60 Minutes' interview with Harris violated a Texas consumer protection law by misleading voters and caused Trump personal financial harm. His suit initially asked for $10 billion in damages. In February, the president amended the complaint to seek at least $20 billion.
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In a March 2025 motion to dismiss Trump's suit, Paramount called the legal action 'an affront to the First Amendment' that is 'without basis in law or fact.' CBS News has maintained that the '60 Minutes' broadcast and promotion of the Harris interview was 'not doctored or deceitful.'
Meanwhile, lawyers for Paramount and Trump have engaged in settlement talks. Paramount offered $15 million to settle the suit — an amount rejected by Trump, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Trump's lawyers want more than that, and they want '60 Minutes' to issue an apology to the president, per the Journal article. In addition, Trump's lawyers President's team 'threatened another lawsuit' against CBS amid the settlement talks, according to the WSJ report.
On Wednesday (May 28), lawyers for Trump and his co-plaintiff, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), filed their opposition to Paramount's motion to dismiss.
A key point of Trump's legal argument is that the edited versions of the '60 Minutes' Harris interview represent commercial speech, and that — as alleged in the president's lawsuit — CBS competes for advertising with Trump's media businesses, including Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (which is majority-owned by the president).
With the edited Harris interview, CBS's 'conduct, including news distortion, constituted commercial speech which cannot by any reasonable interpretation be found to have constituted editorial judgment, and that speech damaged Plaintiffs,' Trump's filing said. 'The fact that such commercial speech was issued by a news organization does not insulate Defendants from liability under the First Amendment.'
'[T]he First Amendment is no shield to news distortion,' according to the Trump team's filing.
According to the filing, the '60 Minutes' editing of the Harris interview 'led to widespread confusion and mental anguish of consumers, including Plaintiffs, regarding a household name of the legacy media apparently deceptively distorting its broadcasts, and then resisting attempts to clear the public record.'
A copy of the Trump team's motion, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, is at this link.
The legal battle comes as Paramount is seeking government approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Three left-wing U.S. senators have warned Shari Redstone, Paramount's controlling shareholder, that such a settlement payment by Paramount to the president would be tantamount to an illegal bribe, although legal experts say it's very unlikely the media company could face such a charge.
The Paramount-Skydance deal is currently pending FCC approval. Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan Carr has maintained the agency's approval of Paramount-Skydance is not connected to the president's '60 Minutes' lawsuit. Last November, Carr said in a Fox News interview that a conservative group's 'news distortion' complaint against CBS over the '60 Minutes' Harris interview was 'likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of [the Paramount-Skydance] transaction.' Paramount Global has said Trump's lawsuit 'is completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process.'
In February, Redstone asked Paramount's board to resolve the Trump lawsuit, including by exploring the possibility of mediation, Variety has reported. Redstone recused herself from the board's discussions about a settlement with Trump.
In response to an FCC request in its examination of the 'new distortion' complaint, CBS News made public an unedited transcript of the '60 Minutes' interview with Harris that aired Oct. 6, 2024 (available at this link) and said the materials showed that 'consistent with 60 Minutes' repeated assurances to the public,' the broadcast 'was not doctored or deceitful.'
In a separate case, Trump last year sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos after the anchor inaccurately stated on-air that Trump had been found liable for rape. (A New York jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.) In December 2024, Disney and ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle Trump's defamation lawsuit plus $1 million in legal fees.
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